Instagram Stories currently have 500 million daily active users. Half a billion people — around one-and-a-half-Americas — use Instagram Stories every single day!

And Stories keep growing, both in their popularity and in their functionality.

So in this post, we’re going to cover some fun tricks, tips and hacks your can use to take your Instagram stories to the next level.​

If you’re not already posting Instagram Stories on a regular basis, check out Episode 3 of my podcast Step Up Your Social and get caught up on what they are and why you should be using them.
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That short podcast episode (all episodes of Step Up Your Social are short — ~10 minutes or less) is the 101. This post is the 202.

So let’s dig in!
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Instagram Stories launched in August 2016 — by October 2016 they already had 100 million daily active users!

• Stories are ephemeral (they disappear after 24 hours)
• Initially you could only use pictures and videos for Stories that were taken in real time — that’s no longer the case
• By late 2017, Stories started rolling out interactive stickers — they continue to introduce new ones regularly
• In early 2018, they introduced GIF stickers
• As mentioned above, at last reporting, they have 500 million daily active users (on a daily basis, more people use Instragram Stories than use any part of Snapchat)​

Want a deeper dive into all the changes and added tools that have been rolled out by Instagram over the years, both for Stories and in their primary feed? Check out my Evolution of Instagram.

But needless to say, Instagram Stories is a vibrant platform and you should definitely be taking advantage of it. Here are some tips, tricks and hacks to get the most out of your Instagram Stories
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​Several Ways to Create a New Story:
Since Stories have become such a successful part of the platform, Instagram has made it all but impossible to miss them when logged into the app. Users’ Stories are spread out horizontally across the top of the screen, just below the Instagram logo.

Your’s is the first circle on the left. If you don’t have an active story, there will be a blue plus icon over your photo. Tap there to create a new Story. Stories last for 24 hours, so if you have made one in the past day, tapping here will show you your current story.

You can also tap the plus button at the top of your profile or home page and then select Stories from the bottom menu choices.

You can also swipe right anywhere in-app to create a new story. That’s right, this is such a popular tool, Instagram — known for their obsession with simplicity — has given us numerous ways to get to the same place.

Spice it Up with Filters & Stickers
Adding filters can make an otherwise run-of-the-mill Story feel special. Take for instance this fun shot of my Turkish carpet. With a few quick taps, I  can easily add some fun flair.

Once you’re on the Story creation screen, you can see a menu of filters in small circles at the bottom of the display. Tap on one, or swipe through to see different filters applied to your photo or video.

Instagram cycles through filters often, so it’s worth scanning through to see if there’s anything new. This example was taken in June, so there were a bunch of cool Pride filters. Some filters like this one have different variations, which you can see directly above the filter list.

Next, there’s the sticker library. These are meant to be placed over your content, and they’re incredibly diverse — GIFs, location, @mentions, #hashtags, donation requests, and more.

To resize or move a sticker, just use two fingers to pinch or drag it, respectively. If you change your mind, drag it to the bottom of the screen, where a trash can will appear. Poof, it’s gone!

Want a deeper dive into some of these fun sticker types? We’ll cover a few of the specific sticker types in more detail below.

Sticker Quick Tips
-Pinch and drag to resize and move stickers
-Tap on a sticker to change what it does — feel free to experiment!
-Change color of some stickers with a tap
-Add a “sound on” button sticker to let viewers know to turn up the volume
-Explore the deep GIF library to find something that fits your personality or mood
-All text is customizable — from font, alignment, size, color, and more
-Tap the squiggle to draw: change line styles & color, add arrows, erase, and undo/redo

All of these powerful and fun tool are… literally at your fingertips.

Check Your Analytics
Wondering who watched your Story and which Stories inspired actions on your account? Analytics aren’t quite able to read minds, but they are definitely the next best thing. 

During the 24 hours your Story is live, you’ll notice in the bottom-left of the screen “Seen by x,” so you know how many people viewed your story. Tap here to see more detailed analytics of how your Story performed.

On the analytics screen, you can see both who viewed your story and what actions they took (for example, if they skipped your story or watched the next one), Instagram will break that down for you. This can be helpful if you’re posting 20 times a day and want to know what’s connecting with your audience… and what isn’t!

Ok, now that we’re all caught up with the basics, so let’s talk hacks!
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Adding a location sticker doesn’t just let your viewers know where you are, it can also potentially extend your reach beyond your current followers. How you use the location sticker is up to you.

You can be super specific — I’m at the WI capitol.
You can be a bit vague — I’m in Madison, WI.
Or you can be super vague — I’m in WI.

There are 2 reasons to use location stickers:
1) It helps people know where you are. And
2) and this is the important one, it could dramatically increase your Story’s reach. 

There’s no surefire way to get one of your Stories added to a public Story* — which will definitely increase your reach  — but not tagging your location guarantees that you WON’T be added to the public location’s story.

*What do I mean by public Stories? When you search for any place on Instagram, you’ll find a menu of images tagged in that location. You’ll also find public Stories that Instagram is highlighting to give a fuller peak at the spot you are checking out.
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And here’s something cool: Instagram is smart enough to know that the WI Capitol is in Madison and that Madison is in WI. So it’s possible you’ll wind up in the public Stories for all 3 of those places. Which is the main reason why specific location tagging is better than general location tagging. But any location tagging is better than none!

Two quick notes on this — 1) not every story should be tagged by location. If you’re sharing a screenshot of one of your tweets, or posting a Game of Thrones meme that got you laughing, it’s okay to skip the location. And 2) — and this is a big one — you don’t actually have to be at a location to tag yourself there. Now of course I’m not telling you to lie to your audience. In fact I’m straight up telling you to NEVER lie to your audience. But if you took a bunch of pictures at an event last night and you we’re too busy to share them to your Stories in real time, you can post them the next day, and tag the location after the fact. Just search for the location within the search bar, select it, and voila. You’re tagged.

You can then move that sticker around, make it bigger or smaller, or tap it to get different color formatting to better fit the feel of your story.
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 There’s a location sticker. There’s also a hashtag sticker. Use it! Just like you might be added to a public location’s Story when using the location sticker — thus increasing your potential reach — using a hashtag sets you up to potentially be added to a public hashtag’s Story.
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Now on a general Instagram post, you can use up to 30 hashtags. Stories won’t let you go that far, but it will allow you to use up to 10 hashtags. The more hashtags you use, the better chance you have of getting added to public Stories.

You can only use the hashtag sticker once in a Story. But if it makes sense for you to add more, just pop on over to your text and start typing out relevant hashtags.

IF IF IF you are going to do this — and of course you don’t have to add 10 #s in every post — consider stacking and then hiding them, so that it doesn’t make your Story look… gaudy.
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Try this:
Create each hashtag as a new piece of text, meaning that instead of just hitting space between tags, you hit done typing out tag one, and then start new text for tag number 2 and so on.

Then, stack them. Literally put them all on top of each other. Which will look awful. But fear not. Once you’ve got your hashtags stacked, head back to your stickers and find yourself a sticker or GIF to stick on top of them. Then no one will see them except Instagram… which in this case is the only one who really matters!

There’s a location and a hashtag sticker. There’s also a mention sticker. This sticker lets you tag someone(s) in your Story. This one won’t help you get into any public Stories, but it will give a public shoutout to the account(s) you are tagging, and just as important, it will send a notification to that account that you have tagged them in a Story.

As I always say — don’t talk about anyone on the internet if you wouldn’t want them to know. And talking about someone on social without tagging them is like talking to them on the phone without first dialing their number. Without it, they might accidentally come upon your post, but a tag all but ensures they see it!

Another reason to tag someone is that when you do so, they’ll get the option to share your Story with their followers. So you give them a shoutout, and then they help you reach new audiences. Win-Win!

Along with hoping your community shares your posts, definitely consider sharing relevant and interesting Stories from your audience that tag you. User generated content can be an amazing way to tell your brand’s story.

And, something cool about sharing other people’s stories — it’s more like a quote tweet than a retweet. Meaning you don’t just have to share their Story as is. You essentially are sharing their Story as a sticker, so you can add your own location, mention and hashtag stickers to it as well as GIFs, text and more. Have fun with it!

​If you haven’t explored the loads of fun stickers available to you in Instagram Stories, you are missing out! Along with the ones we’ve already covered, and GIFs (which I love!), there are also some really cool engagement stickers built right into the platform.

You can use stickers to solicit questions from your audience (which you can then answer in follow up Stories), take polls, quiz your audience… there’s even a countdown clock available to you if you have an exciting event taking place and want to build some excitement.

​Explore and get to engaging your audience with stickers.

Find a photo you like. Whether it’s in your browser or saved on your phone, either will work.

In your browser, long tap the image until you see the option to save it. Once the image is saved to your photos, tap the Share button and then tap copy photo.

Now, head back to your story. The copied image should pop up in the lower left hand corner of the screen. Tap on it and bang! You’re good to go.

If you miss the pop up, don’t sweat it. Just open the keyboard, hit paste, and you’re back in business.

That was the tip—here comes the hack! You can save transparent images (.png files) like a Polaroid frame and use these as stickers too. This way, it’s easy to get really creative with a few basic building blocks. Add these in the same way you added those previous stickers, and you’re in business.

This is a super fun and interesting way to create your own content, and most importantly, to be able to do so in your own voice (and with your own colors and branding).
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Did you know that you can add ANY public Instagram post — your own or anyone else’s — to your Stories? To do so is extremely simple: at the bottom of the post, next to the heart and comment icons, there’s a little paper airplane. Click it and you’ll see the option to “add to story.”

Click that and whatever you were looking at will appear as a sticker in your Story. When I say “whatever you were looking at,” what I mean is that if it was an album, you can only add one image, and if it’s a video, you will only be adding a screenshot of the thumbnail associated with the video.

But once you have the image in your Story, you can move it around, make it bigger or smaller and add all of the stickers, GIFs and text you want. And if you tap on the actual post, it will change the formatting from the clean image with a tag of who posted it, to an image that includes the handle and part of the post’s original text.
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Here’s the coolest hack for this though — go to your GIF library and search “tap here.” You’ll have loads of options — pick one you like. Add your “tap here” sticker to your Story.

When someone taps it, they’ll get a seemingly magic option to visit the original post. Here’s the thing — they would get that option whether or not you point them to tap there. Most folks just don’t realize that it’s an option to click through.

The built-in call-to-action makes it super easy to drive people from your Story to your original post (or anyone else’s). It’s a big part of why more and more accounts are creating Stories from their posts. It’s a second audience you can engage around the same content, and you can potentially drive people back to the original content at the same time.

​I don’t recommend doing this for every one of your posts, but definitely a helpful tool for the posts you are particularly excited about.

Take any picture and then tap the pen tool. Select the first pen, pick your color of choice on the bottom and then hold your finger down on the screen. The whole background will become that color.

If you want to add a transparent color over top of one of your pictures, you can do that too. Instead of selecting the first pen, select the second one, which looks more like a marker. Choose your color, hold down and you get a transparent overlay over top of your picture.

Want to get really clever with either of these — create your solid or transparent color over top of a picture, and then use the eraser to remove color from the selected areas. That can create a very cool effect!
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If you have 10k+ followers, you can link a Story to an external link. This is a very powerful tool, but one that not a lot of users actually have access to.

For those of us with less than 10,000 followers, you do still have one option for linking out from your Story — you can link it to an IGTV video that you have previously posted.

IGTV, short for Instagram TV, allows you to post longer videos then you can post within Instagram proper. On Instagram, you are limited to one minute videos, but with IGTV, you can go up to 10 minutes (some bigger accounts can even go up to an hour).

It can be a great way to repurpose videos that you created elsewhere but couldn’t post to Instagram because they were too long.

​Once you have posted something to IGTV, you can link directly to the video through a Story. To do so, simply tap the link icon at the top of your story. You will then be able to select from any of your pre-published videos in IGTV. Then anyone seeing your Story can swipe up and get to your IGTV video.

Like with the “Tap Here” hack, search the GIFs library for a “Swipe Up” call-to-action. so your audience realizes that your Story is intended to take them somewhere else to continue on in the fun!

You can also share an IGTV directly to your Instagram Stories. To do so, simply select it and add it to your story like you would any public post. This will not show the entire IGTV, but will let people stream a few seconds of it and give folks an option to keep watching your full video at IGTV.

Here’s a fun hack — while Instagram recently upped their font offerings, including a drop shadow option, it’s still a bit limiting as far as customizing your retro drop shadow text look. Want to create a drop shadow effect using the colors and fonts of your choice? Doing so is really easy!
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Create your text. You can change the size but doing so makes this hack a little tricky. Position it right where you want it, and then create the exact same text again, just with a different color.

Then place one of the texts on top of the other, but just slightly off, enough to create your own… wait for it… drop shadow.

Want to see an example of this in action. Head over to my Instagram account — I’m @jlemonsk — and then check out my Story highlight titled IG updates. Whenever I create a Story about a new Instagram feature, hack, or strategy, I add it to that highlight. Scroll through and you’ll find one that shows this drop shadow hack in action.
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I saved this one for last because it is just so freaking awesome! Want to add a sticker, text or GIF to a video and have it follow along with the video, rather than just remaining static in one spot? Doing so is actually really easy!
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Create a video Story (either take a new video in the app, or add in a video that’s already on your phone). Then, select a sticker or GIF you want, or add even text. While the video is playing in the background, long press the sticker or text.

You’ll then get a scrollbar at the bottom of the screen. That scrollbar will let you move through the video at your own speed. Scroll to a spot that lets you clearly see where you want your sticker to stay pinned. Then move/resize the sticker until you have it where you want it. Hit pin and voila. You’ve pinned your sticker, text of GIF.

This one’s a little complicated, so here’s a quick recap:
-Create a video story
-Select a sticker
-Tap and hold the sticker
-Scroll to a good spot
-Hit pin

Assuming your video isn’t too complicated for Instagram to handle, it should paste your sticker or text onto that spot in the video and then let it follow along throughout the duration of the video.

So in this example, I pinned a Like sticker to a little toy car. Let’s call it a Heart-Ford. (Fun pun to always remember the capital of Connecticut: the Heart Ford Connects a Cut 😂). Instead of the Like sticker just sitting in the corner, it zooms along with the car.

Pretty cool, right?
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Everything you’ve seen in this post can be created directly in Instagram. But if you want to take your Story game to the next level — or if you want to innovate some hacks of your own — feel free to try out some of these third-party apps.

These design tools are useful beyond Instagram, with templates and editing capabilities to make almost anything you need for your social media program. 

Adobe Photoshop: The gold standard of image editing, Photoshop now has a great mobile-friendly version of the app
Adobe Spark: A browser-based editor with thousands of fun templates
Canva: Similar to Spark, Canva is a user-friendly, browser-based image editor
InShot: A powerful video editing tool with cool filters

These next 3 apps focus specifically on Stories, and each has a free or paid option, so you can take your content as far as you can imagine.

Over:  Easy to edit templates for beautiful stories
Unfold: Story-editing tool with beautiful, designer-built templates
Instories: A personal favorite, this is imho the most fun story editor with dynamic and fluid titles and video frames that make your Stories look quite professional without much effort at all

Your Turn!
What are some of your favorite strategies, tricks or hacks that you have been using to step up your Instagram story game? I want to hear about them. Hit me up on Instagram (again, I’m @jlemonsk), or on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn where I’m Reverbal Communications.

Or… show off what you’ve learned! Make a cool Instagram Story and use the hashtag #StepUpYourSocial.

If you tag me in your Stories, you better believe I’m gonna share it! So hit me up!

Now what are you waiting for? Get out there and step up your Story game!​

You know the old saying that the only constant is change?

Well, that never been more true than when talking about social media.

You go to bed understanding exactly how a platform works — you wake up to find that everything has changed. There are new features, but also missing features, and moved features, and some features that are still there but no longer work. Arggghhh. It’s enough to make you logoff and go refill your coffee. But when it comes to the big platforms — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Reddit… they know you’ll be back. So you just have to sit back down, pound that coffee, and get used to their radical new designs.
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It’s been just shy of 10 years since Instagram was first launched in the app store. In a lot of ways, Instagram today is still very similar to the platform it was way back then (ten years is a lifetime in tech!). But while Instagram might feel pretty similar day in and day out, they’ve actually been rolling out new products and features pretty consistently year after year.

They have also hit some pretty big milestones along the way.
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So let’s dig in and breakdown some of those key new features and major milestones in this Evolution of Instagram.
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The year was 2010. The Social Network was in theaters. Moves Like Jagger was on the radio. Lost was wrapping up its final season, disappointing millions of fans all over the world. And Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger were rolling out Burbn, a mobile check-in app that was essentially a clone of Foursquare. Kevin and Mike realized they had a problem. So they did what anyone in their position — who had already raised a half a million dollars in funding — would do and they pivoted.

And thus Instagram was born. For those wondering, the name Instagram came from combining Instant (as in instant camera) and telegram.
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At the time, you had to access Instagram through a mobile device. Ten years later, that’s still the case. (It’s actually not, but it still feels that way.)
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In 2007, a bunch of Twitter users inadvertently invented the hashtag as a way to more easily connect and converse at a conference.

Twitter leadership thought it was a “thing for nerds,” but alas, the hashtag was born.

Hashtags were eventually incorporated into Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr and Google+ and of course, Instagram, where they made their debut in January 2011. (They have also FINALLY made their way to LinkedIn, which in the words of Verge reporter Casey Newton, is just “Facebook in slow motion.”)

Mark Zuckerberg paid a billion dollars to buy Instagram, despite the fact that they had no revenue stream and were only 13 employees strong.

At the time, people panned the purchase. But not today! With over a billion active users, and long serving as Facebook’s primary growth platform for young people, that billion dollars now looks like a heck of a steal.

If you like logging onto Instagram, checking in on your friends and the few select brands you follow, and then getting out, you were good to go from day one.

But if you are looking for new accounts to follow or interesting content to peruse, well Instagram wasn’t really built for that. Until June of 2012 that is, when they rolled out Explore.

Explore let’s you rove around Instagram in a new way, not just by username or hashtag, but also by content suggestion, curated specifically for you.

Instagram picked up 100k users in the first week following their launch. It only took them a few months to get to a million users. It was six more months before they hit five million users and another three months before they hit ten million users.

They launched in October 2010. It took them less than 2.5 years to add that ninth digit to their user-base. By early February 2013, they already had more users than any European country had citizens.

Not bad for a platform that had just 13 employees a short ten months ago!

If you are an active user of Instagram, you might not even realize that there was once a time you could only upload images to the platform. But for their first few years of existence, there was no video to be seen in Instagram.

That changed in June 2013 when they rolled out the option to upload videos of up to 15 seconds in length. (Note: at the time of this writing, that’s the length limit of videos shared to TikTok — it will be interesting to see if they too “evolve.”)

Despite paying a billion dollars to acquire Instagram, Facebook held off on monetizing the platform via ads for a full year-and-a-half.

Presumably, there was a lot of work to do on the backend to enable their ads program to synchronize with Facebook’s pre-existing advertising platform.

While the initial ad rollout was limited to sponsored posts, it set the stage for Instagram becoming a product with an estimated standalone value of $100 billion.
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Instagram is a primarily public platform, as opposed to Facebook which for individual users tends to default to content being shared only with friends.

So while you could tag your friends in posts and comment on their content, you were doing so for the world to see. But those were pretty much your only options.

That changed in December 2013 when Instagram rolled out Direct Messaging.

Now you could have private conversations with friends, without ever having to leave Instagram.

While the first 100 million users took 2.5 years to acquire, the next 100 million joined in on the fun in just 13 months.

By March 2014, Instagram had a bigger user-base than the population of Russia, Mexico or really any country in the world save for a few.

Those 15-second videos really made an impression!

If 15 seconds of video is good, 60 seconds of video must be better, right?!

As of March of 2016, you could start uploading videos to Instagram that were up to 60 seconds in length.

Still not long enough to play the full version of that new song you just wrote, but at least now you can get through the whole refrain!

There’s an old adage in the social media world: when a platform becomes popular, Facebook will aim to own it or clone it.

While they managed to buy Instagram and WhatsApp (as well as a slew of other companies that aren’t quite household names), a couple of the big players eluded them.

They desperately wanted Twitter. But Twitter wouldn’t sell. So in short order, Facebook introduced hashtags, verified accounts, trending content (now defunct) and a bunch of other features that were all “inspired” by Twitter. (Ie: they couldn’t own it, so they went to work trying to clone it.)

But Facebook’s appetite to consume Twitter was nothing compared to the newer kid on the block, Snapchat.

Snapchat, launched in 2011, was immediately popular with the youth, a demographic that Zuck knew he needed to keep satisfied and clicking if he wanted to remain at the head of the social media table.

In 2013, just two-years after launch, he offered $3 billion to buy them out. They refused. Facebook reportedly tried again shortly before Snap went public. He was again rebuffed.

That second attempt happened in 2016. Coincidently, that’s the same year that all the primary platforms in the Facebook universe (that’s Facebook itself, Messenger, WhatsApp and of course Instagram) rolled out Stories.

Stories are ephemeral content (they disappear after 24 hours) that are intended to be less perfectly quaffed, more fun and allow a user to post as often as they want throughout the day without worrying about bothering the almighty algorithm.

While Snapchat is still doing its thing, there’s no doubt that the rollout of Stories slowed their growth considerably.
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At first, Instagram Stories only allowed users to share pictures or short videos taken in real time. Then they expand that to allow you to share pictures and videos you had shot within the last 24 hours. That limitation quickly went away as well, as Instagram enabled the ability for users to share anything on their phone roll (well any photo or any video up to 15 seconds in length).

But Stories also quickly started rolling out fun filters and camera tricks (very similar to Snapchat, who had been providing such offerings for quite some time).

One early and popular such feature was Boomerang — which enables a user to take a short video which is then popped it back and forth, like a boomerang.

While they aren’t as popular today as they were when they first rolled out, you would have a hard time spending 10 or 15 minutes scrolling through IG Stories without coming across at least a couple such clips.

From 2010 until early 2017, you could only share one piece of content to your Instagram timeline at a time.

That changed in February 2017 when Instagram rolled out Albums. Albums made it possible to share up to ten pieces of content at once. (You can mix and match photos and videos in a single album.)

This made it easier to share bigger stories to the timeline without having to pump out a bunch of separate and disjointed posts.

Learn more about Albums, and how to use them, with this explainer piece I made when they first launched using… what else? An Instagram Album!
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Instagram has rolled out loads of fun features to Stories over the years, but it was in October 2017 that they rolled out their first interactive stickers with the introduction of the poll sticker.

You could use it to have people weigh in on a simple multiple choice question of your liking (simple because you were — and are — limited to only two answer choices). Once a user votes, they can see the breakdown of how everyone else has voted.

Like with all Stories, those containing polls still disappear after 24 hours. But it was the first of many stickers that Instagram Stories would offer intended to help bring your audience into the conversation.
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It didn’t take long for Instagram to realize that people were putting a lot of time and effort into their Stories, and that while some should just go ahead and disappear after 24 hours, it would be nice if users could keep some of them around.

And with that was born Highlights. (I’ve always thought this feature would have been called Albums, if Instagram hadn’t already used that name on a product less deserving of it).

Highlights are very important — first of all, they let you keep select Stories public indefinitely.

But even more importantly, they let you flesh out your account’s profile page, which has always been quite limited.

For your Instagram profile, you get a pic, a short bio, a location and a link to a website (the only active link you can use on the entire platform!). Now suddenly, if you choose to use them, the next thing someone sees while looking at your profile, after your photo and brief bio, is your Highlights. So if used well, they can really do a lot to help you tell your story in a more in-depth and relevant way for your audience.

Let’s say you own a restaurant. You might have one Highlight for salads, another for entrees, a third for desserts and a fourth showcasing the awesome artisanal cocktails you create in house.

Or let’s say you run a boutique. You could have a Highlight for hats, another for skirts, one for accessories, and one for handbags.

Highlights are a great way to show your audience what you do in a way that simply isn’t possible through the limitations offered in the Instagram profile section.
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I’m not gonna lie — I’m one of those people that’s reluctant to update the iOS on my phone for fear of messing with something that’s not broken.

I was probably a year behind the current iOS when Instagram Stories introduced GIF stickers (GIFs are short videos that play on repeat) and I was so anxious to get access to them, I updated my phone.

My phone was fine, but alas, it was months before the amazing GIF library found its way into my account. Why? That’s just the way it goes sometimes. Instagram and Facebook don’t typically rollout new features to everyone all at once.

But suffice to say, I eventually got them and two plus years on, the novelty has still not worn off. Not even a little bit! 😉 ​
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Instagram Stories was initially limited to sharing real-time photos or videos. But right from the beginning you could type or draw on top of them.

Well in February 2018, Instagram Stories rolled out Type Mode, enabling the option to share JUST text, without any associated media.

While it might not be the most engaging kind of content to share, there are certain times when all you need is text, and it’s nice to have the option.
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This one is controversial y’all.

In June 2018, Instagram Stories partnered with Spotify to enable the sharing of short clips of songs directly into a Story.
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That part is is simple enough. But do a Twitter search for “why can’t I share music on Instagram?,” scroll through the endless steam of angry, frustrated or just plain sad users, and you’ll see where the controversy lies.

Because here’s the thing: only personal accounts can share music, not business accounts (more on that in a bit). But really, even that isn’t exactly true! Sometimes business accounts can share music, usually however they can’t. Or that’s my experience anyway.

Why? Because Instagram is a website and there are glitches. Sometimes things work, sometimes they don’t. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ ​
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By June of 2018, Instagram Stories — less than two years after their rollout — had more daily users than there are people in the United States (or again, any other country on the planet save for India or China).

Not bad for a product that was initially designed simply to slow down a competitor!
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​Facebook has been extremely invested in video for quite some time. So it is no surprise that Instagram would find ways to allow users to share videos longer than one minute.

In June 2018 they rolled out IGTV, short for Instagram Television (yup) enabling users to share videos ranging from 61 seconds up to ten minutes. Some accounts could go as long as an hour, but in my experience, most are limited to ten minutes.

The IGTV rollout was extremely flawed from the outset and widespread use has been so limited that they actually rolled it off into a standalone app where it could sit quietly and not bother anyone.

You can still watch users IGTVs (two points to anyone who knows who to do so!), but mostly it serves as a tool to let people trying to upload longer videos to be able do so. Of course if you do so, people can watch the first minute of your video in their feed, but then they have to switch over to the IGTV version to continue.

The biggest mistake Instagram made with IGTV bar-none (in my opinion of course) was limiting IGTV search to only apply to the handle of the user who uploaded the piece, and not to the accompanying descriptive text.

I’m clearly a huge social media nerd — when a platform rolls out a new product or feature, I’m going to try it. When IGTV launched, I quickly headed to the search bar and searched for bluegrass (I’m a bluegrass musician and fan). What did I find: content from a bank in Kentucky… and not much else. Because the search term only applied to the name of the sharing accounts, despite the fact that just like with any other post, you could describe the video you were sharing with accompanying text. Hell, you could even use hashtags, but since they were unsearchable, they were completely worthless.

For example, lets say Del McCoury or Punch Brothers upload a video to IGTV, and introduce it as their “new bluegrass track,” I still couldn’t find it by searching bluegrass, because their name doesn’t have bluegrass in it. They could even tag it as #bluegrass and still nothing! Pretty silly, don’t you think?!
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Despite IGTV not giving them the bump they surely hoped for, less than eight years after launching, Instagram did what few have done before — they hit the billion active user mark.

Quite a feat for a company whose initial launch was just a knockoff of Foursquare!
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Stories was Facebook’s response to Snapchat. So when TikTok raged onto the scene in the summer of 2020, it was clear that Facebook would have to respond. They initially created a standalone app called Lasso, mimicking many of features of TikTok. But that app was shut down before anyone had really even heard of it. (Honestly, had you heard of it?)

When that didn’t work, they decided to stuff the complexity of an entire other social channel directly into Instagram. After all, it worked with Stories – why not try again?!

Thus Reels was born.

Reels hasn’t seen the same kind of fast usership growth as Stories, mostly because it’s more complicated to use than Stories and doesn’t do as good a job at actually solving a problem for users.

Stories enabled users to worry less about creating a perfect take before sharing a picture or video. Reels… kinda does the opposite. Videos have to be a very specific amount of time (15 or 30 seconds) and have to tell an entire story in a way that Stories didn’t require. Stories can run together to show the happening of an evening or a campaign. Reels standalone and have to start and conclude, while ensuring something interesting happens in a very short and concrete amount of time.

There’s clearly an appetite for creating and consuming such content (see: the explosive growth of TikTok!) but it doesn’t naturally compute than everyone on Instagram is going to take the time or effort to join in on the content creation.

That said in November of 2020, Instagram rolled out a massive redesign of the app, placing Reels front and center (it literally took the place of the button that, since day one, was used to create a post!). So clearly Instagram is invested in its success.

Side note: this redesign also added a shopping tab, as Instagram continues to invest in the ecommerce side of social.

Whether or not Reels can ever claim the kind of standalone success as Stories is to be determined, but it’s clear that Instagram will continue to invest heavily in this internal spinoff. And as long as the political future of TikTok continues to remain murky, that decision from Zuck and co. makes sense.

The above list of product rollouts and milestones is far from exhaustive. Very far in fact!

Despite Instagram retaining its simplicity year after year, it is actually constantly changing.

If I wanted to make this post twice as long, I easily could have done so! But for your sake and mine, I’m not going to do that.

That said, here are a few highlights we didn’t cover, but that are worth noting.

February 2016: Since Instagram has always been a mobile-first platform, it has bothered people to no end that you couldn’t login to more than one account at a time. Back at the beginning, if you wanted to share content from more than one account, you had to logout of one and login to the other to do so. In 2016, they added the option to be logged into five accounts at once (but no more). This was a much appreciated feature for anyone who works in social media!

March 2016: Instagram switches its feed from chronological, where you see whatever was posted most recently by anyone you follow, to algorithmic, where Instagram determines what content you see and in what order, based on what they think you will like.

May 2016: Instagram introduced a business account, which looks and feels identical to a regular account but comes with a few extra tools, the most important being analytics!

July 2016: They began to enable the ability to better moderate comments on your threads.

January 2018: Instagram added an “Archive,” storing all of your Stories even after they have disappeared. They are only visible to you, unless you have them shared in a Highlight. But with the Archive, you can go back and add old Stories to Archives, even if they’ve already disappeared from your profile.

September 2018: Instagram’s founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, resigned from the company. Notice how closely this follows the rollout of IGTV. Wonder if they’re related? #JustSaying

October 2019: Instagram removed the “Following” activity tab, which let you see the activity of the people you were following, breaking the hearts of exes and creeps everywhere!

This post could go on and on. But we’ll stop here.

What have been your favorite features Instagram has rolled out over the years? Are there any you wish they would retire from the platform?

Have their been any changes that you think should have been on this list but weren’t? Share them in the comments or hit me up on social.

In case it’s not obvious, I never get tired of talking about this stuff!

I hope this post was as helpful for you to read as it was for me to write.

If you enjoyed it, connect with me on Instagram (@jlemonsk). I regularly share platform updates, tricks, tips, hacks and the like. As well as the occasional pictures of my kids and my cat. (You know, all the good stuff!).

See you there.
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