Social Throwback 2023: A year where Instagram enhanced user experience & launched a rival app for X

With approximately 229 million users coming from the nation, Instagram continues to be an important social media platform for India. From music, movies, and viral sensations to brand banters, every possible chatter makes its way into the Insta-verse. To accommodate this growing community globally, the platform continues to enhance its features and functions.

Instagram's year started by declaring that the social media platform would take a huge pivot in its core ideologies. In the previous year, the platform had solely kept its focus on elevating the experience for Reel users and growing its short-form video services. But by the end of 2022, Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, announced that the platform would equally focus on Photos in 2023, which is the original business model for the social media app. 

To stay true to these claims, in-line with adding new features and updates for creators and Reel users, the app also added them to carousel posts. A noticeable one was where the app added the feature of adding a soundtrack in carousel posts which was previously limited to single stand-alone posts. The app also made several test runs for its 'Storeis' and 'DM' sections, further making a safer platform for the users. 

Apart from focusing on being a photo-sharing app, a major update that the social media platform delivered was launching a text-first platform -- Threads. Within five days of its launch, Threads overtook OpenAI’s ChatGPT to become the fastest-growing app in history with 100 million users. Despite this exponential growth, however, the app saw a steep downfall as the number of active users started declining rapidly by July end. By mid-August the number of daily users on Threads fell by 80%. 

The year also saw the social media platform continue to bolster its features for creators, users, marketers, and advertisers alike. From enhancing its exposure to communicate with its users to adding multiple layers of security, launching a sister app, and ads and incorporating generative AI into the platform, the Meta platform saw multiple updates and changes throughout the year. 

Here's a recap on what went down on the photo-sharing turned video consumption app in the year 2023:

January 2023

• Instagram introduces ‘Quite Mode’, especially targeting teens. The feature enables users to regulate their social media use. Once activated, the user won't receive any notifications and their profile activity status will change to ‘In quiet mode’ and we’ll automatically send an auto-reply when someone DMs them. 

• The platform rolls out new ways to manage ‘recommendations’. Users could now choose to hide multiple pieces of content in the Explore section and the platform would actively avoid recommending them in Reels, Search and more.

• Users can also hide comments and DMs containing specific words. This would apply to recommended posts they might see across Instagram. 

February 2023

• The social media platform launches Broadcast Channels, a new way for creators to interact with their followers. The new feature was introduced to users by Mark Zuckerberg with his own “Meta Channel. Creators can use broadcast channels as a casual, quick way to keep followers up-to-date. They can use text, photos, video, and voice notes to share their latest updates and behind-the-scenes moments and even create polls to crowdsource fan feedback. Only creators can send messages, while followers can react to content and vote in polls.

March 2023

• The platform rolls out new ad formats for advertisers. Before launching it, Instagram partners with brands to Starz to test a new ad format. The new format, named ‘Reminder Ads’ makes it easier for businesses to announce, remind and notify people of future events or launches that they might be interested in. People can opt into convenient reminders and receive three notifications from Instagram one day before, 15 minutes before, and at the time of the event.

• Begins to test ads in search results to reach people actively searching for businesses, products and content.

• Meta winds down its NFT-related content on Instagram. Stephane Kasriel, head of Commerce and Financial Technologies at Meta announces the news on a ‘X’ thread. 

Some product news: across the company, we're looking closely at what we prioritize to increase our focus. We’re winding down digital collectibles (NFTs) for now to focus on other ways to support creators, people, and businesses. 🧵[1/5]

— Stephane Kasriel (@skasriel) March 13, 2023

April 2023

• The platform announces ‘Reels Trends’. Starting just in the US, creators would get a separate tab for navigating what is trending around them and the world. 

• Creators get more insights into their reels, the platform rolls out the ‘Average watch time’ feature and ‘Total watch time’ feature for reel creators to navigate their performance. 

• The social media platform expands its ‘Digital gift program’ to other countries. Apart from the USA, the feature expands to Australia, Canada, Mexico, France, Newzland and the UK. 

• The platform enables users to send prioritized DMs & publish projects through third-party creator marketing platforms. 

May 2023

• Instagram rolls out ‘Collaborators’ in channels where creators can have guests join them in their broadcast channels. 

• GIFs make it to the comments section of the social media platform. By tapping on the comment icon on a post users want to comment on they can add a GIF to their comment.

• Digital Gifts rolls out in India as well. 

• More editing features get expanded to global users. 

• Branded content ads gets renamed to ‘Partnership ads’. Apart from the name change, Advertisers could now boost more types of organic Instagram content as partnership ads, including branded content with the paid partnership label, Instagram Collab posts, @mentions, people tags, product tags, and other content without the paid partnership label, as well as continue to create new partnership ads in Ads Manager without an existing post. 

June 2023

• Adam Mosseri announces a new feature named ‘scrubber’ on his broadcast channel. A >10s button for iOS and >15s for Android gets added to reels for users to rewind the reels and not miss out on important reel details. 

• Instagram’s ‘Notes’ section gets music support and translation support. 

• Instagram ‘Broadcast Channels’ makes it to global users. 

• The social media platform allows US users the ability to download Reels posted by public accounts. Additionally, public accounts could also turn off the ability for people to download their reels in the ‘Settings’ section. 

July 2023

• X (formerly Twitter) gets a rival as the Instagram team builds a new text-sharing platform - Threads. With Threads, the platform aimed at what Instagram does best and expanded that to text. Just like on Instagram, with Threads users could follow and connect with friends and creators – including the people they follow on Instagram and beyond. 

• The platform adds a ‘Template Browser’ feature where users can browse templates by category in the Browser, organized by recommended, trending, and templates or audio they’ve saved.

August 2023

• Instagram tests ways to tag a group of people to stories using a single mention. 

• The platform adds the feature to include a soundtrack in carousel posts. Previously this was limited to a single photo. 

• Collaborations become more diverse. The photo-sharing platform gives access to  invite up to three friends to co-author a feed post, carousel or reel. Once they accept, the content will reach each collaborator’s audience and appear on each account’s profile grid. This feature gets extended to private accounts as well. 

• Instagram bridges the gap between a creator and their fans further. With the  ‘Add your sticker’ feature, a creator or artist can invite their followers to join in on a fun prompt or challenge they create on Reels, and then hand-pick their favourite submissions to celebrate their fans’ creativity.

• The platform tests audio notes. 

• Threads gets a web version.

• The duration of Reels extends from 90 seconds to 10 minutes.

• Tests the ability of public accounts to share comments from any public feed post or Reels to their stories. 

• Tests the possibility of adding location to Notes. 

September 2023

• Instagram launches the ‘Following’ option on the Reels tab. This allows users to only see reels from the accounts they follow, with the newest posts first. 

• Announces the arrival of ‘Meta Verified’ to businesses on Instagram. Subscriptions would include business authentication with a verified badge, proactive impersonation protection, access to account support and features to help businesses stand out. 

• Starts to incorporate Generative AI experience on the platform. Rolls out customizable AI stickers for DMs and Stories to select English language users and AI image editing tools. 

• Introduces a beta version of Meta AI assistant and 28 AIs with unique personalities and interests that users can interact with and DM on the platform. Users can choose the age, gender, and ethnicity of the AI chatbot. Users can also choose the personality of the chatbot as reserved, enthusiastic, creative, witty, pragmatic, or empowering. These customizations will influence how the chatbot will interact with the user.

October 2023

• Tests the ability to share stories to multiple audience lists. 

• Tests the possibility of turning photos into custom stickers to use in reels and stories. 

• Tests the ability to post selfie videos in Notes. 

• Tests the way users interact with each other. Expands the ability to invite friends to join in user’s posts. Before posting a carousel, users could turn on the ability for their followers to submit photos and/or videos which can be approved to be added to the post.

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• Announces new features to ‘Reminder Ads’ that make it easier for creators to create and reach a wider audience. Reminder ads can now be featured within Instagram Stories, allowing businesses to increase visibility and improve efficiency through this additional placement. Reminder ads can be created directly in Ads Manager, which removes the previous requirement of only using organic posts to create a reminder ad

November 2023

• The ability to add lyrics to reels gets added. Users just have to make a reel, click on the music icon '🎵' and select a song then swipe left to add in the lyrics.

• Tests the possibility of turning off read receipts in DMs. People could choose when to let others see when they’ve read their messages. 

• Downloading public reels goes global. 

December 2023

• Notes gets a few updates. Users can now record and post a short, looping video to their Notes. Users can now respond to notes using photos, audio, videos, GIPs and stickers. 

• Rolls out the ability to create ‘Add Yours’ templates. Users will be able to share their custom, memeable templates by pinning GIFs, text, and gallery images. 

• Instagram rolls out an AI-driven background editing feature for users in the United States. Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta's head of generative AI, announced on Threads that this tool enables users to alter the background of their images by using prompts within Stories.