When your feeds and Stories trays are sold out, or your fan count stops growing, you move away from Instagram . That is why the application is implementing two new features designed to connect with new people and diversify your graphic, so there is always something surprising to see and like.
Today Instagram launches its Snapcode QR-style identification tags globally on iOS and Android, after TechCrunch broke the news about the show in March and April. Although technically they are not QR codes, they scan like them to allow you to follow people you know offline. Here's how it works:
Customizable codes are accessible from the three-line burger menu in your profile. They can be scanned when other users press and hold their code through the Instagram Stories camera or the Scan Nametag button on their own Nametag to follow it instantly. You can add colors, emojis or self-portraits adorned with AR to your Instagram name, show it on your phone to help people follow it in person, put it on your website or social networks or send it to your friends via SMS, WhatsApp, Messenger and more.
Actually, it's surprising that Instagram has taken so long to copy the Snapchat Snapcodes that debuted to the profiles in 2015 and then expanded to open websites and unlock the AR filters. Facebook Messenger launched its own QR codes in April 2017, although it was never successful. But they have a lot of sense in Instagram because it is more difficult to share links in the application, people often consider it their main presence on the web they want to promote and because companies rely more and more on the application for commerce. It is easy to imagine brands placing their Instagram tags on posters and posters, or buying ads to promote them on the web.
QR codes for Facebook Messenger and Snapchat
Second, Instagram is beginning to test school communities in a variety of universities. in all of EE. UU They allow you to join your university network to add a line to your profile that includes your school, year of class and your specialty, sports team or fraternity / brotherhood. It will appear in a directory with a list of all the members of your school that you can use to track or send messages to people, although those DMs can go to your pending inbox.
School communities have traced back to the origins of Facebook, when users could actually establish their privacy to show all their content to everyone at their school. Here you will not be able to instantly expose your private Instagram to everyone in your school. You could imagine a freshman in college going through his network to discover new potential friends to follow, or an ex-student who looks for others in his alma mater in search of business or romance.
Instagram relies on information that users have publicly shared about their school and the people they followed to verify if they were actually students or alumni of a university. Instead of actively registering, users will receive a notification that they will be asked to join the network. That is much less reliable than using the university's email addresses for verification as Facebook used to do, but also much simpler for users.
The company provides a tool to warn about the misuse of the function of school communities in case there are old users incomplete. They are using it as a stalking tool. Next to each user's name, there is a three-point overflow menu where people can report accounts that they do not believe belong to a particular community.
The invitation method recalls the growth hacks that the TBH teenagers' question and answer application that Facebook acquired was using. In what an internal note called a "psychological trick", TBH scraped the profiles of Instagram users for the names of the schools, searching the school's location pages to find the students' accounts to invite them to join. TBH. The adolescent sensation finally closed due to low use; the memo described the tactic as "scanty" for a large public company, but now it has found a home on Instagram.
Today's launch is the first under the new Instagram leader, Adam Mosseri after the resignation of the founders of the company. Critics are watching to see if Mosseri, the former vice president of Facebook for News Feed and a member of Mark Zuckerberg's inner circle, will push harder to boost growth and monetization for Instagram. Given the priority of Instagram, here is to expand its social graphics and keep users engaged, it seems willing to trade occasionally allowing or rejecting the wrong people to reduce friction and juice growth.