Instagram is on a quest to find the most interactive features for its users. To keep active users engaged and to help them express their love and support for one another, Instagram now has a ‘like’ feature for stories.
Today, we all want to stay connected but keep our DMs (Direct Messages) light. We want people to appreciate our social media posts, but indulging in long digital conversations can give a hard time to most. Hence, the new Like feature on Instagram stories will resonate with most users.
Unlike the past features – sending a reaction or reply to stories – the new ‘like’ feature doesn’t clog the DM section. This makes it a perfect solution to send appreciation across without nudging the recipients much. Considering the unending list of stories that one sees on a daily basis, sending a reaction or reply to everyone might be difficult. Sending a heart or like is easier – just the oar one needs to keep the love sailing on social media.
So how to use this new feature?
1. When you see someone’s Insta story, notice a heart icon (♡) in between the ‘Send Message’ and share icon (which looks like a paper plane icon).
2. Tap on the heart icon to send your like for the story.
3. The ‘like’ will end up in the recipient’s notification and not DM.
Here’s how Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, explains it:
❤️ Private Story Likes ❤️
Starting to roll out today, you can now send some love by liking people’s stories without sending a DM.
Likes on stories are private and do not have counts. Rather, they appear as hearts next to people’s handles in your Stories view sheet. ??
pic.twitter.com/l56Rmzgnnw
— Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) February 14, 2022
Recipients can see the likes on their view sheet; but these are not visible to the story audience/viewers. The ‘likes’ on a story will work differently from how they work on feed posts.
The new update doesn’t deactivate the old features; you can still send a reaction, or message as a story response. The feature was rolled out on Valentine’s Day for most accounts. Other accounts may also expect the update shortly.
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