Although Instagram has improved on letting the public opinion be known, the interactive polls and emoji sliders on stories are still quite limiting. Allegedly, a new feature is coming to Instagram that will allow users to ask open-ended questions within a story.
It seems like Instagram wants to give creators more liberty to communicate with their followers. This feature would come with no character limits, meaning that the question can be an entire script, or consist of just a few words. It could open a lot of new doors for both influencers and their followers regarding the public conversation. Increased engagement might help the app get an influx of new users.
It is still unknown whether these questions will come in an inbox separate from the Direct Messages tab. For the influencers that have thousands or even millions of followers, it is impossible to answer every single question that they receive via DM. This feature could become a breaking point in how creators are able to communicate with their audience.
There is still a big question on whether this feature will be anonymous. Answering a poll or using an emoji slider shows the creator of the story exactly who and what they voted for. Making the open-ended questions anonymous or giving the user an option to hide their identity could be useful in certain types of situations.
An Instagram spokesperson confirmed the development of the new feature, saying that they are always testing new ways of improving the experience on the app while trying to engage the users as much as possible.
Even though it is not currently available worldwide, it seems that the users from Spain and Indonesia are among the first ones that are testing this feature. More and more users are getting it every day, however Instagram still hasn’t provided an official release date.
So, how are you going to take advantage of this new feature if it comes out?
Seems like they’re taking a page from Tumblr’s Ask feature, though knowing FB/IG they’re probably targeting this to their business customers primarily as a way to somehow monetize the use of learning about their audience. It wouldn’t surprise me if they somehow limited the scope of the feature for regular accounts and increased options for business ones, at least at some point down the line.
Interesting thing to add, not sure if I’d ever have a reason to use such a feature personally, don’t really have any questions to ask people… and if I did, I’d just do it in the caption of a photo
I agree with @ian. On my personal account I saw a few people who had this feature and they used it exactly like the tumblr ask box. Not sure I will use it. If I want comments/feedback I prefer to point people to my recent post in order to gain the engagement rather than use this like a DM. As a business it could be a good way to solicit feedback, but I’d still like to get that feedback into the actual posts, rather than it being hidden.
I’m interested to see how others may use it so it could spark something for me too. But as for right now, I don’t see myself using it a lot.
interesting. I see this fitting well within the fitness space. Having open ended ASK ME ANYTHING days, or AMA about XXX DIET… or something like that.
Most accounts i follow tend to answer questions via dm, then screenshot the convo via story.
This new feature would perhaps be able to show that thread without the creator manually sharing it? am i getting it right?
Very interesting! Hadn’t heard of this feature till now. Thanks for the heads up!
I can already see some uses for this feature, especially business accounts. You can run a contest on stories and people can respond via this feature.
You can run Quizzes too! Running a Quiz on your feed ruins it because someone always spoils the answer for the others. This way, the answers are hidden!
Could be an interesting way of creating UGC as well. I remember the “GIF The Feeling” campaign by Coke. This could be a way of doing it on Insta if we can set up a bot that replies to these answers with media files.
