Instagram Introduces Notes on Reels and Feed Posts: A New Way to Connect Over Content
Instagram / Notes on Reels & Posts
Instagram has launched the ability to leave Notes directly on Reels and Feed posts.
How It Works
Lindsey Gamble / Instagram Notes on Reels and Feed Posts
Now, when users click the airplane icon on a post, they can tap an "Add Note" option, choose either "Close Friends" or "Followers you follow back," type out a Note of up to 60 characters, and share it.
The Note will appear as an overlay on the post and will only be visible to the user and their selected audience for up to three days. The author of the post can only see the Note if they are part of the selected audience. Users can like or reply to Notes, and replying will start a chat.
Creators can control whether people can add Notes to their posts. Similar to Posts and Stories, users can also mute Notes from accounts.
Supporting Instagram’s Mission
This launch supports several priorities for Instagram. It continues to expand Notes, which are the second most popular format for sharing among teens. Teens are about 10 times more likely to create a Note than others, making Notes a key driver for this sought-after demographic.
More importantly, it supports Instagram’s mission of connecting people through discovered content (‘shareable content’). It provides another avenue for discovering content through friend recommendations, acting as a middle ground between sharing a post via direct messaging and tagging someone in the comments.
Impact for Creators
While this feature is geared towards everyday users, there’s often a tie-in for creators with such updates. Notes left on posts are likely to appear in friends' feeds, giving creators the chance to reach new audiences. It’s reminiscent of how LinkedIn surfaces content in your feed that your connections engage with.
In some testing, I added a Note to a post from 2020 on a secondary account of mine. The post was shown to a notable number of people who follow me on my primary account, leading to a few dozen new likes and followers on the secondary account in just an hour or so.
Currently, creators don’t have a way to track how Notes impact performance. Instagram doesn’t notify creators when Notes are added or who adds them to their content, but it’s not far-fetched to think that creators might eventually be able to see the number of Notes left on their posts in the future.
The Potential Downsize
Based on how the feature works, a few issues could arise. One potential problem is that creators might abuse the feature by participating in Notes engagement pods to boost each other’s content.
For users who follow accounts actively using Notes, it could become annoying to see an excessive amount of Notes content in their feed, especially if it’s content they don’t like. This could also result in users seeing less content from the accounts they follow, which is already a concern for some. However, the muting option helps address this issue.
No Slowing Down
Jasmine Enberg / Share Button on the Navigation Bar
2024 has quickly become the year of shareable content for Instagram. For several consecutive weeks, Instagram has been driving this focus. With this new update, alongside the recent testing of a prominent share button in the navigation bar that replaces the post button, it’s clear that more changes are on the way. Creators, brands, and social media managers will need to continue to think about how to make their content shareable—whether through DMs, reposting to Stories, or leaving a Note on posts.
