4 Important Changes on Instagram in 2021

Instagram is constantly changing. Often, these are changes that aren’t really relevant. However, in 2021, Instagram is bringing some changes to the app that will definitely affect you. Do yourself a favor and inform yourself about that changes before they are released. That way, you can get everything in place in time and don’t have to chase after the changes.

1. Merging Messengers

Facebook has long revealed plans that they are planning to merge Facebook Messenger with Instagram Direct Messages and WhatsApp. On 10-01-2020, they already started merging Facebook and Instagram messenger. It started as a test phase with selected people in certain regions and will most likely become the general solution in 2021.

These features will also be added to Instagram Messenger in the near future:

• Communicate across apps: Now you can communicate with friends and family between Instagram and Messenger, as well as send messages back and forth between the two apps and participate in video calls.
• Watch together: Watch IGTV videos, reels (coming soon!), TV shows, movies, and more on Facebook Watch in a video call with friends and family.
• Self-delete mode: in this mode, messages are deleted as soon as they’re read or you close the chat.
• Selfie Stickers: Create a series of Boomerang stickers with your selfie and use them in your conversations.
• Chat Colors: Personalize your chats with interesting color variations.
• Custom Emoji Reactions: create a shortcut of your favorite emojis to quickly respond to messages from friends.
• Share: Easily share exciting content with up to five friends or groups.
• Reply: Reply directly to a specific message in your chat to keep the conversation going.
• Animated message effects: Give your messages more expressiveness with animated effects.
• Message settings: Set who can send you Direct messages and who can’t send you messages at all.
• Enhanced message reporting and user blocking: When you add your accounts in the new account dashboard, you can now report entire conversations on Instagram in addition to individual messages, and proactively receive suggestions about users you could block.

The Messenger will therefore be much more dynamic than before. This provides an opportunity for influencers with theme pages to optimize their shoutout sales processes. For example, you can now create automatic replies with your adstock link for business inquiries.

2. IGTV Monetization is Coming

This is probably one of the most spectacular innovations coming in 2021. While it has long been normal for YouTube, Twitch and other video/streaming platforms to allow content creators to earn money from their posts through advertising, Instagram has avoided it so far. On Facebook, the in-stream ad feature is available since 2017 and quite a few accounts earn 4-5 figures a month through the ad breaks on Facebook. However, not every account is allowed to run in-stream ads. On Facebook, the requirements look like this:

• You must meet Facebook’s monetization guidelines for affiliates.
• You must post your content on a page (not a profile!) with at least 10,000 subscribers.
• You must have generated at least 30,000 1-minute video views in the past 60 days on videos that are at least 3 minutes long.
• You must be at least 18 years old.
• You must live in a country where in-stream ads are available.

It’s conceivable that similar guidelines will apply on Instagram. Facebook’s monetization guidelines say that it’s only allowed to post original content. That means it could be impossible to use monetization for your theme page – however you might be able to get around this by creating memes or changing the content in any way. Since many completely ignore IGTV, this information would definitely be a good reason to have a look at it again.

3. Instagram Keyword Search is Coming

Until now, you could only use hashtags on Instagram to search for topics that you were interested in. Unfortunately, this way of searching hardly ever led to the desired posts for searchers. Pinterest, Twitter & others have done a much better job at this point. Instagram wants to change that in 2021 and by making keywords searchable. Makes sense, there’s is a lot of content on Instagram!

The Search Engine Journal gives an example of how it could look like:

„Instagram keyword search works by allowing users to type in a keyword such as “home office inspiration,” rather than being limited to a hashtag like #homeofficeinspiration.

Search results should then surface posts about home office inspiration even if they’re not specifically tagged as such.

It’s not exactly known how Instagram determines what a post is about without relying on hashtags.

It’s known that Instagram will use captions to surface posts for keyword searches, but even there are still many questions.“

In the context of this, it’s quite possible that the topic of Instagram SEO will open up as a whole new field. For companies, it will be of particular importance to be displayed high up in the search for certain keywords. If you want to grow your theme page it could also make great sense to know which factors are important to rank high.

4. Pictures Are Dead

Instagram is rewarding users more and more for video content. This makes sense. After all, the time spent on videos is significantly higher than on images. Reels and stories are the growth factors for accounts in 2021, as evidenced by Instagram’s decision that reels will soon be allowed to be 60 seconds long. With images, you can hardly reach people outside your follower community. So if your work is based on pictures so far – consider using videos on your account as well.

Here are 6 tricks about how to trigger the algorithm. Your welcome!

If you know some more important changes on Instagram im 2021, feel free to share it in the comments!

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