A Totally Silly (and Sometimes Serious) Wishlist of Instagram Features

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A Totally Silly (and Sometimes Serious) Wishlist of Instagram Features

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With over one billion users and 95 million posts shared per day, it’s safe to say that Instagram is an important social platform—for consumers and brands alike.

There are many reasons to love Instagram—from its adaptation of the Stories feature, to its near single-handed revolution of the way we take and share images. But even though it feels like a new feature is released almost every week, we sometimes can’t help but daydream about even more features we’d love to see.

Bonus: Download a free checklist that reveals the exact steps an adventure photographer used to grow from 0 to 110,000 followers on Instagram with no budget and no expensive gear.

10 Instagram features that don’t exist, but it would be cool if they did

1. The ability to change your homepage feed to a chronological timeline

It’s no secret that the Instagram algorithm change has been controversial. But allowing users to choose how they want to view their homepage feed—as Facebook does—would give a sense of autonomy back to the user. Seeing how many users choose this option would also give Instagram more insight into how people are using their platform.

2. Editing a story after it’s been published

Everyone has been there. You’ve taken a great story, uploaded it, and then checked to see how many people have viewed it, only to discover that you’ve made a terrible faux pas—a spelling mistake. This small feature could save a lot of blushes!

3. Being notified when someone unfollows you

Ever since the the dawn of social media time users have asked for this feature, but no social platform has yet made it available. Maybe they know something users don’t?

If you really have to know who has unfollowed you and when, there are third-party apps that can do this for you, but it would be cool if Instagram just told you itself. That way, brands could be notified in real time if a bunch of users unfollowed them at once, alerting them to a problem with a recently published post or Story, or perhaps even a broader PR crisis.

4. The ability to add multiple locations

Because sometimes one location just isn’t enough. But in all seriousness, there are reasons why the ability to add multiple locations is helpful to both users and brands.

For instance, if you’re a cafe showing off your latest creation, tagging both your city and street address is helpful. Potential new customers or tourists can find you by looking at posts from the city itself or the location of your cafe. It widens the reach of your content, and where it can be discovered—this would be especially true for brands reliant on tourism, as more and more audiences are using social as a way to research trips and vacations.

5. Live links in captions

Does this one really need more explanation? It would be nice to link to articles and blog posts in captions instead of saying “link in profile” over and over again.

6. Posting from desktop

First and foremost, Instagram was designed to be an app to use on the go and in the moment. But most of us—especially brands—only post high-quality, professional-grade photos and videos to our feeds now. As such, the ability to upload content via desktop would be a welcome feature upgrade. Especially if you don’t keep your content on your phone at all times, or if you use professional editing tools on your photos before posting.

The good news? You CAN upload photos to Instagram from your desktop with Hootsuite (and you can schedule posts too).

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7. The ability to repost from other accounts

Both Twitter and Facebook have this feature as part of their core functionality—so why not Instagram too? It has benefits for both users and brands—from giving users a new way to interact with content they love, to brands being able to ‘regram’ user-generated content.

This feature is currently available through third-party apps, but it would obviously be much easier to do it natively with Instagram.

8. Being able to add your own presets natively into the platform

While Instagram offers a wide-range of editing tools that are enough for most users, it still lacks some functionality that many other apps offer—and that power users like influencers and brands would really appreciate. Presets—the filter settings that influencers use on their content to give it a certain look—are booming right now with many influencers selling their presets for fans to use on their own content. Instagram would make a lot of people happy by adding this small feature.

Another cool extension of this would be allowing users to add their own emojis to their Instagram emoji library. You can already do it for GIFs—why not emojis too?

Bonus: Download a free checklist that reveals the exact steps an adventure photographer used to grow from 0 to 110,000 followers on Instagram with no budget and no expensive gear.

Get the free checklist right now!

9. Search functionality in DMs

We know that Instagram isn’t a messaging app, but more and more fans are sliding into their friends’ DMs to chat. Brands also deal with customer service queries via chat. So adding a DM search ability would be a major win for a little cost.

10. Controlling who sees what content

Although Instagram allows limited functionality on who can see what on your profile (e.g. your mum can see your posts but not your Stories), allowing users to entirely control who sees individual posts and Stories would be an interesting feature.

Google+ was arguably the first platform to make this a major feature with “circles.” Facebook and Twitter also made attempts at allowing users to control their privacy in this way.

With brands, it gives the opportunity to test organic content within different groups of their choosing—they can see what content resonates before posting across all their groups or using it in their ads.

For users, it gives them more autonomy and control over their page, allowing for greater privacy—something that all social channels are moving towards.

Some silly, some serious, but these are some features that Instagram could look at implementing to keep the ‘grammers happy. While 10 feels like a long list, Instagram is a platform that continues to push forward and innovate in social media, so we’re not too worried.

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October 18, 2018 at 08:45AM