Introducing New Ways to Connect With Groups on Instagram

What’s happening

One of the biggest reasons people use Instagram every day is to connect with their friends, and Stories and messaging are where we see these connections happening the most frequently. We’re building new features in Stories and group messaging to help people express themselves, connect, and grow closer to their friends in more creative and fun ways. 

 

New ways to share and connect in Stories 

Today, people are already sharing moments throughout their day to Stories – from highlights to the more everyday things. We know some people hesitate to share what they're up to in Stories because they’re not sure what to share or worried about how it will be received. We want to help people more easily share moments in spontaneous, fun ways so they can grow closer and better connect with friends. 

 

● Add Yours nominations: Since we launched Add Yours in Stories last year, we’ve seen how prompts help inspire people to share in unplanned and creative ways. Now, when you see the Add Yours prompt in Stories that remind you of a specific friend, you can nominate them to participate by tapping “pass it on”.

● “Takes” in stories: Sharing what you’re up to is more fun when your friends participate too. “Takes” is a new, easy way to share in Stories where your friends need to share in order to see what you shared first. Capture a “take” from the stories camera, the multi-author story at the top of your stories tray, or from the daily notification reminder. Select to share to all your followers or just people you follow back. 

 

Collaborate and keep up to date with your groups

Group chats on Instagram are where people send and  connect over entertaining content, reminisce, coordinate plans, and share things only the group will understand. We’re continuing to build more ways for people to collaborate and connect with each other in groups. 

 

● Roll Call in DMs: Roll Calls are prompts you can send to your group chat to encourage your friends to respond using photos or videos. Roll Call in DMs will help you start conversations with friends and make it easy for others in the group to join in too.

● Reels Albums: Albums are collaborative reels that  stitch together photos and videos shared in your group chat into a video, so your group can easily collaborate, watch and enjoy these shared moments together. You’ll also be able to share the Album on your own profile or Reels tab.

● Collaborative Collections make it easy for you to organize and co-create collections with friends from posts you saved, helping connect over your shared interests. Find all your collections in the shared media section of your chats. 

● Group Profiles are a new type of profile on Instagram where people can join to share posts and stories to a dedicated, mutually-shared space with friends. Whenever you share content into a Group Profile, that content is shared to group members instead of your followers, and lives on the Group Profile, instead of your own grid. Given the growth of group chats on Instagram, we’re excited to test more ways for groups to connect and share together. Select Group profiles from the menu to get started. 

 

We’ve seen a trend in social media apps that are promoting time sensitive, authentic sharing. We’re also seeing people share unfiltered moments on Instagram in a variety ways such as “photo dump” carousel posts,  participating in Add Yours, and resharing content from other apps. 

 

People come to Instagram every day not only to see content, but also to create and share content with their friends. We know sharing is a barrier for some people who worry about how others will react to their content or aren’t sure what to share. We’re building new features to help people feel more comfortable sharing what they're up to in quick, easy ways — new story formats like “takes” or opportunities to collaborate with a group of friends  through group reels and collaborative collections.