Instagram Stories: Users can get lots more views with new Facebook tie-in

The move will please heavy social media users

Aatif Sulleyman

Thursday 05 October 2017 12:04

(Getty)

Facebook and Instagram have tied their platforms closer together, in a setup that will satisfy heavy social media sharers.

Some users now have the ability to post Stories to both social networks simultaneously.

Previously, if you wanted to share the same Story to Instagram and Facebook, you’d have had to record it on one of the apps, save the post and then publish it twice.

11 useful Instagram features you didn't know existed

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1/1111 useful Instagram features you didn't know existed

Filters are a core part of Instagram, but there are so many available it can be easy to get lost. You can change the order in which they appear, and even hide the ones you never use, to speed up your photo-sharing process. On the filters page, scroll to the end, tap Manage, then drag and drop the ones you want to reorder, and un-check the ones you want to hide.

Instagram controversially ditched its reverse-chronological order feed for a new order determined by an algorithm, making it easy to completely miss some posts. To make sure you never miss a certain somebody’s updates, you can set up notification for them by visiting their profile, tapping the three dots in the top right-hand corner and selecting Turn On Post Notifications.

If you’re worried about how much of your mobile data Instagram saps, you can limit it by sacrificing the speed at which the photos and videos in your feed load. Go to your profile, tap the three dots in the top right corner, open Cellular Data Use and choose Use Less Data.

It’s easy to lose track of your friends’ old posts on Instagram, but if you know you Liked it, you’ll be able to track it down easily. Just go to your profile, hit the three dots at the top and select Posts You’ve Liked. You can also save posts in a folder only you can see by tapping the bookmark icon underneath it. Take a look at everything you’ve bookmarked by tapping the same icon that sits near the top of your profile.

Everyone knows you can expand the reach of your posts by using a number of relevant hashtags, but what those are aren’t always glaringly obvious. You can easily find the right ones for you by typing a keyword into Instagram’s search bar, selecting a hashtag from the list and swiping along the Related row that appears at the top of the screen.

Whatever your reasons are, you can clear your recent searches by going to your profile, hitting the three dots in the top right and selecting Clear Search History. To go a step further and hide your Suggested searches too, go to the search page, tap and hold the account you want to hide, and choose Hide from the pop-up window.

Tagged photos on Instagram aren’t as prominent as they are on Facebook, but anyone can still browse through other people’s pictures of you by visiting your profile and tapping the photo of you icon. If you’re tagged in a picture you don’t want other people to see, go to your profile, hit the photos of you icon, tap the three dots at the top of the screen and choose Hide Photos.

Make your Instagram account much harder to hack by enabling two-factor authentication, a security feature that protects you even if your login details are stolen. Go to your profile, tap the three dots, open Two-Factor Authentication and toggle it on.

If you want to upload a bunch of related pictures and videos without flooding everyone else’s feed, you can shared them all as one post. Hit the + icon, select Gallery, choose Select Multiple, pick out up to 10 of the pictures and clips you want, tap Next and reorder them by dragging and dropping.

Instagram Stories has been a massive hit since it came out last year, but you might not know that you can record Stories clips without having to hold one of your digits on the record key. On the Stores screen, just swipe through the options at the bottom until you get to Hands-Free.

Most people know you can delete any of the images you’ve already posted, but not everyone is aware that you can also edit them. Instagram unfortunately doesn’t let you tinker with filters and effects, but you can change your original caption, tag people and update the location.

From a user’s perspective, the move unlocks a much bigger audience of potential Stories viewers.

However, the tie-in could help Facebook enormously.

Stories – which was ripped from Snapchat – became an official Facebook feature earlier this year, but it’s yet to take off.

Despite it having pride of place at the top of the News Feed, most Facebook users are ignoring it, possibly because the Facebook Camera is still relatively new and unfamiliar.

On the other hand, Instagram Stories – which launched last August – has been hugely successful, and has 250 million users.

TechCrunch says the cross-platform Story sharing option should come to everyone soon, but it’s currently only designed to work in one direction: from Instagram to Facebook.

According to a recent report, young social media users are “less-engaged” with Facebook than they are with rival social networks, and are therefore leaving the site, logging in less frequently and spending less and less time on it.

Instagram and Snapchat, however, are continuing to thrive because they use more “visual content”, the report added.

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