Major Upcoming Changes For Instagram And Snapchat Users

Date: September 04, 2024

Two of the biggest social media tech giants will soon release application updates that significantly impact user experiences.

Social media platforms are rapidly upgrading their game of user engagement to capture the maximum audience sizes. While AI leads the innovation space in most social media platforms, Snapchat and Instagram have thought of some simple yet powerful upgrades to enhance user experience.

Instagram is adding a new comment feature to posted stories, but it will be a semi-private engagement canvas. The new feature will only be accessible to those followers whom the story poster follows back. Earlier, users could reply to stories, and it would end up in their inbox section, which would remain a private affair. Now, all followers of a story poster can see the comments left on a story.

In a recent post on its Threads handle, Instagram explained the commenting process and its related rules through a creative explanatory video.

Just like stories, the comments will remain public for 24 hours and will go down along with the story. Instagram has not clarified if the comments will get archived after 24 hours, just like the stories do. Users can also turn the comments on or off for every story or create a default preference with exceptions in the settings.

What Snapchat is reportedly working on may not be great for users to hear, but it brings relevant advertisements closer to their regularly visited interface. Snapchat is planning to add Ads next to messages from your friends. 

Introduced for the first time with the name Sponsored Snaps, the ads will remain in the message tab of the application. This brings sponsored content to the top of chat inboxes, the most frequented section of Snapchat.

Snapchat’s CEO, Evan Spiegel, has clarified that there will be no push notification for Sponsored Snaps. The ads will appear only when users open the application and visit the chat section. It is unclear if the advertisement snap will go away if left unopened or accumulated, as it may cause a chaotic inbox experience for users. One of the reasons why the tech giant may have chosen this revenue path is its all-time low stock trading price. The company is making major shifts in its revenue streams and optimizing resources to bounce back to a profitable position in the social media market.