What You Need to Know About the Updated Instagram Messenger

Facebook and Instagram have integrated several features into Messenger for a seamless inter-platform user experience.

What’s New?

The trendiest update undoubtedly is the visibility of Instagram Stories. This feature allows you to upload content created within the last 24hrs directly from your smartphone’s camera roll.

• You can add stickers to your Story to give it a personal touch and add context.
• You can use emoji buttons, stickers about the weather, time, location, or just a caption.
• You can even do a clickable poll on your Story.

Instagram has a separate queue for Stories than its posts. When the IG Story is viewed, the site’s algorithm puts it in the feed of viewers in order of appearance. This makes users far more likely to engage with this Story even when they may not be engaging with the account’s posts so frequently. Story Views can thus significantly change an account’s social engagement metrics.

IG Stories are the new means of reaching out to a mass audience. It’s trendy among personal and business account holders alike because of its fast turnover in social engagement. Services selling social signals to boost online visibility now sell special packages tailored to increase IG Stories’ organic activity. Stories are increasingly used for:

• sharing product information,
• brand building,
• announcing contests,
• establishing the awareness.

Recently, Instagram also introduced Stories Highlights to keep Stories active for longer than 24 hours. How long one wishes to keep it busy is user-dependent.

Exciting Things to Know About

Here is a list of what else Instagram offers on its latest version of Messenger services:

• You can now swipe to reply to messages and react with emojis to conversations sent by Facebook friends without leaving Instagram.
• You can customize your settings to automatically receive message requests and video chats from Facebook accounts on the IG app.
• If you have made your account details public, your Facebook friends can easily find your Instagram account by typing your Facebook name on the IG messenger.
• Conversely, you can also block and report unwanted messages on Messenger.
• You can activate disappearing messages.
• You can share links to posts.
• You can personalize the chat by changing the font, chat window color and use stickers. You can even send animated selfie stickers!
• You can view videos together with others on Messenger.