This week has been interesting for social media as Instagram officials have just announced ‘something new is coming.’
App officials have just posted on their official Twitter account that the app will be launching a new feature they call ‘story drafts.’ The upgrade, which has been long asked for by business accounts and regular Instagram users as well, can be a real game-changer for marketers in terms of social media campaigns and post planning.
Here’s the original tweet:
Something new is coming 📣
Soon you’ll be able to finish what you started with story drafts.
— Instagram (@instagram) March 23, 2021
New feature, new possibilities
According to Adam Mosseri, the current CEO of Instagram, social media users have been repeatedly requesting the app to enable the option of story drafts.
In short, this feature allows users to create stories and save them as drafts so they can be posted anytime. Users will be able to see their drafts in a special section inside the app and they will remain private until the user hits the ‘Post’ button.
One of the top app researchers working on the team, Alessandro Paluzzi, also shared a couple of screenshots revealing how the drafts feature will look:
Let’s take a look at the upcoming Story Draft feature in #Instagram https://t.co/kA3DeWIIXm pic.twitter.com/CT8ORvIn5R
— Alessandro Paluzzi (@alex193a) March 23, 2021
Much like the pre-existing features, the Draft one seems equally clean and easy to use.
Right now, our only option is to create Stories and download them on our smartphones. Many third-party apps like Planoly also claim to help you organize your stories better, but they require additional steps and settings that just end up being time-consuming.
Why does it matter?
From a marketer’s point of view, this is just the type of feature we need to upgrade our social media campaign strategies.
Since Instagram doesn’t provide the option to schedule posts (like Facebook does), creating drafts is our best shot at staying organized and having every campaign ready to be posted. In my personal experience, creating drafts for news feed posts has been very helpful because I already had the photo description, hashtags and location in place.
Imagining that soon we’ll be able to customize our Stories without the inconvenient loss of image quality we now get from downloading them on our device just to post them later is a big game-changer.
Since we’re talking about Instagram, app owners have also been recently warning us to take caution when it comes to scammers that issue fake notifications to get personal information.
Recently, more and more scammers have turned to Instagram in an attempt of getting personal information illegally. The main technique they use is to send direct messages to users related to an alleged ‘copyright infringement’ claim as if they came directly from Instagram. If you happen to get any message on this topic, Instagram advises you to report it as soon as possible; the only way Instagram communicates with its users is through the official ‘Emails from Instagram’ section within the app.