Instagram Tests New Memories Prompts to Re-Ignite User Engagement

Instagram’s attempting out a brand new method to immediate customers to re-share their outdated posts, with a ‘Reminiscence’ Story immediate now exhibiting up in some customers’ feeds.

As you may see on this instance, shared by Jack Horwood, Instagram is testing out a ‘Reminiscence’ Story immediate, which is actually its archive function, simply re-packaged otherwise.

When you faucet on the Reminiscence story, you’ll then be proven earlier tales that you simply shared round this date.

So, yeah, it’s just about one other method into the archive function, whereas Instagram has had different iterations of one of these immediate within the app for a while. However now, it’s giving customers a extra direct push to re-share their previous tales, which is analogous to Fb’s ‘On at the present time’ prompts, and will encourage extra engagement inside the app.

On the identical time, it is also an indication that IG engagement is in vital decline.

Again in 2015, Fb was going through a disaster, with overall content sharing in decline, and private posts – like folks’s personal ideas and pictures – down a large 21% year-over-year. Fb’s reply to this was to pump extra ‘On at the present time’ and recollections prompts into person feeds, so as to spark nostalgic engagement and interplay round your previous updates.

By 2017, greater than 60 million Fb customers had been visiting their personal “On This Day” page on daily basis, and 155 million had opted to obtain devoted notifications for the function. The extra pushes sparked extra engagement – but on the identical time, additionally they, arguably, started to shift the main focus of Fb in the direction of a distinct kind of content material sharing, much less aligned with the most recent tendencies and updates, and extra centered on family and friends.

It appears Instagram may now be wanting to lean into the identical. Instagram chief Adam Mosseri has already acknowledged that non-public sharing has switched from the main IG feed into Stories and DMs, and perhaps, that is one other method to lean into that conduct, in an effort to preserve person engagement.

I imply, Instagram continues to be seeing growth in Reels engagement, so it’s not prefer it’s shedding out general, and Meta’s additionally reported that its AI content material suggestions are serving to to drive extra engagement. However whereas customers are consuming extra video in its apps, fewer folks, reportedly, are posting private updates, each to Fb and IG, whereas utilization of Instagram Tales can also be down 10% on earlier ranges.

Possibly, then, that is a part of a brand new push to re-engage person sharing, and get folks posting themselves, relatively than simply taking in additional really useful movies within the app.

It labored on Fb, prompting hundreds of thousands of individuals to faucet into their recollections, is smart that Instagram may see the identical.