An interesting Instagram Follow does not necessarily make for a good Instagram Stories Follow.
First, I love Instagram, it’s parent company and how they connect people in ways that were never possible before and this will not be one of the many ranting posts that complain about a free service that we all get a ton of enjoyment from.
As a 40 year old tech enthusiast, I enjoy trying to stay current on emerging technologies and trending apps like Snapchat and Anchor and putting out constructive feedback for the creators to consider as they refine and improve their products.
Snapchat was the fist app that was a steep learning curve on how to use and it’s value, but once I got it, have really enjoyed it. For me, it’s a fun way to broadcast my unfiltered life to a very small subset of my friends in a way that I would never do on Facebook or Instagram. The tightness of the social circle and short shelf life of the content is what make me comfortable just putting things out there. I also only consume content from a curated group of close friends and celebrities that I find interesting. Snapchat’s latest move for snapchat to upload more polished content versus shooting it live and in the moment may take away some of its charm, but we shall see.
When the Instagram app updated yesterday and added snapchat-like features, I was initially excited and then overwhelmed by the number streams of content from my Instagram network.
On the following side, an interesting Instagram Follow does not necessarily make for a good Instagram Stories Follow. With no current way to only select the people you want to see Stories from, I found myself unfollowing many accounts that started publishing stories that just cluttered the row of people at the top of the app that I may want to view on a regular basis. I find myself spending more time in the app unfollowing people until I realized I was slowly morphing may Instagram exprecine into my snapchat experience.
On the content creation side of Instagram, I am too private of a person to simply broadcast snapchat like content to people that follow me. There is one option to select individuals you do not want to be able to see your post, but even I don’t think what I am posting is interesting enough to spend the time to go through and start blocking people per post each time.
A great solution would be to have the default setting to opt-in to see people’s stories as well as manually add the people you want to view your stories. For celebrities, brands and people that want to broadcast to all, have an option for that as well. This would allow you to have two unqiue experiences and reasons to I use the app.
