What Instagram's Latest Tests Mean for Creators and Brand: Meta Verified Feed, Custom Stickers, and Collaborative Carousel Posts
Instagram has been quite active recently, conducting numerous tests on new features and tools. Alongside the previously announced tests for polls in the comments of Posts and Reels, Instagram has introduced several other tests, including a Meta Verified feed, Custom Stickers, and Collaborative Carousel Posts.
Let's explore these and their potential impact on Meta, creators, brands, and everyday users, touching on discoverability, Gen Z trends, and collaborative opportunities.
Meta Verified Feed
First is the Meta Verified feed, a new feed option that joins the existing Following and Favorites feeds. This enables users to exclusively view posts and Reels from verified creators and brands who have subscribed to Meta's premium subscription service or have a legacy blue check. Instagram is positioning this as a way for creators and brands to be discovered.
Why It Matters: Paid subscription services have become a focal point of social media platforms, offering an alternative revenue stream alongside advertising. By adding an enhanced discovery feature to its subscription service, Meta aims to attract a larger subscriber base.
The quest for increased discoverability and reach is one way to attract users. Currently, both are limited. Given creators' and brands' eagerness to discover new methods for gaining visibility and expanding their reach, there is a likelihood that creators and brands will sign up for Meta Verified or maintain their existing subscriptions for this new perk.
However, the success of the Meta Verified feed depends heavily on users actively sorting their feed by Meta Verified. The Following feed, a highly requested feature, sees limited usage due to the cumbersome user experience. This includes the lack of a prominent button that keeps it top of mind for users that they can change feeds or the ability to save preferences so that users see their preferred feed when they open the app each time.
Custom Stickers
Custom Stickers empower creators to design their own stickers using photos for Reels and Stories. Creators can upload images from their camera roll or select eligible ones on Instagram, then specify the subject for removal from the background to create a sticker for their Reel or Story.
Why It Matters: This addition is valuable for creators as it introduces a fresh creative tool to elevate engagement in their Reels and Stories. While Instagram has recently introduced AI-generated stickers, Custom Stickers aligns with the current trend of collage and cutout content, particularly popular among younger audiences, including Gen Z.
Apps like Lemon8, which briefly dominated app download charts in the US, and Pinterest have found success by offering similar features. For instance, Pinterest's fastest-growing demographic is Gen Z, with part of this growth credited to its standalone collage maker app, Shuffles, which also inspired the launch of a new native Pinterest feature called Cutout.
Instagram's investment in supporting a feature that provides a comparable experience illustrates its focus on retaining and engaging the Gen Z audience.
Custom Stickers can potentially encourage more users in this demographic to move beyond their Direct Messages and actively share their creativity with a broader audience in Reels and Stories.
Collaborative Carousel Posts
With Collaborative Carousel Posts, users can invite others to contribute to their feed posts when creating carousels. This allows followers to submit photos and/or videos, which can be approved and added to the post. These additions are exclusively visible on the original post and are not shared to the feed or profile of the submitters (unlike Collabs). Usernames and timestamps are also visible for the submitted photos or videos.
Why It Matters: Collaborative Carousel Posts introduce new opportunities for collaboration on Instagram. This feature joins a growing list of tools facilitating collaboration and co-creation, including Collabs, Add To Yours, Collaborative Collections, and Group Stories.
Creators and brands can use this feature to co-create with their communities. For example, creators can invite their top fans to submit content for a chance to be featured, while brands can encourage consumers to submit content featuring their products or services, resulting in user-generated carousel posts. An example is a restaurant crowdsourcing photos or videos from recently visited customers.
There is also the potential for Instagram to eventually expand the feature's functionality, similar to TikTok’s Branded Missions, allowing brands to officially crowdsource content and incentivize users in exchange for the usage of the content they select.
Additionally, this feature provides creators and brands with an opportunity to expand their partnerships. Brands can invite their creator partners to submit their sponsored content, especially content from live experiences or trips together, making repurposing easier and introducing a fresh way to package creator content.
