The updates keep coming at Instagram.
With Snapchat seemingly against the ropes, and Facebook touting the future of Stories as the primary interface for social sharing, the platform has announced a range of new features in recent months, with many more spotted in testing.
Now Instagram’s adding another interactive tool – a new voting options for Stories called the ‘emoji slider’ sticker.
As explained by Instagram:
“The emoji slider lets you ask more nuanced questions when you want to find out how your friends feel about something. By choosing an emoji for your question, you also add a layer of emotional context that helps those answering understand your tone and answer accordingly.”
Not sure how much ‘emotional context’ you add exactly, but it does provide another way to prompt viewer response to your Stories content, and could help both individuals and brands better engage with their audience.
As shown above, users will be able to see responses to their emoji slider poll, while viewers will also be shown the average based on how others have responded once they’ve locked in their reaction.
It’s another tool in Instagram’s ever-growing feature set, with a particular focus on Stories.
A quick re-cap – in the in the last three months alone, Instagram has announced:
In addition to this, they’re also reportedly testing:
The Instagram team are certainly working to keep up the momentum, and it’ll be interesting to see how the platform’s newly appointed VP of Product – former News Feed chief Adam Mosseri – will look to maintain this, bringing his expertize from boosting engagement on Facebook across to the app.
From a social marketing perspective, the new emoji slider option clearly has a range of potential uses – brands will be able to use the tool to generate more engagement and interaction, which, ideally, will help them boost their reach.
An important note, however – while you can now cross-post from Instagram Stories to Facebook Stories (and subsequently, Messenger Day), the Instagram-specific functionalities you apply will not work on Facebook, which can be a bad look if users don’t understand why they can’t ‘swipe up’ to see more or slide the emoji sticker across.
It’s worth keeping this in mind as you go about putting together your Stories approach – but definitely, with more and more options on the way, and more people using Stories, it’s worth considering in your strategy.