Instagram’s adding some new features for the holidays, including Collages for Stories, seasonal “Add Yours” templates, new fonts, chat themes, and more.
First off, on Collages. Last month, some IG users reported seeing a new “Collage” option promoted in-stream.
Now, Instagram is officially launching the tool, as part of its holiday season push.
As you can see in this example, Instagram is promoting its collage tool as a means to showcase your year on Stories, with a collection of your updates from 2024.
As per IG:
“Share your favorite 2024 memories in style. As you take some time to reflect (and plan that EOY photo dump), share this years’ highlights to your story with an EOY-themed collage.”
Instagram’s been experimenting with collages for some time, with the platform also testing out collages within group chats earlier his year. The function also replicates Pinterest’s collage options, which stemmed from its separate “Shuffles” app. That app gained some traction with audiences last year, and Pinterest has since adapted collages into its main app as well.
And unsurprisingly, with a social function gaining traction, Meta has taken note, and cloned the same on IG. Though there is a solid use case here, and you can imagine that this will be popular with Instagram users over the holiday period.
Instagram’s also rolling out some new “Add Yours” templates to encourage participation in the season.
Add Yours templates prompt viewer participation in Stories trends, and these end of year templates aim to get you friends sharing their own takes and shots as a sort of recap.
Instagram’s also rolling out a new “New Year” font and a “Countdown” text effect (you can see the “New Year” font in the example image above), while it’s also got some new chat themes for the season.
It’s also adding new highlights for selected phrases in both Notes and DMs. So, for example, if you add a note which says “Happy New Year”, that will get new purple highlighting in-stream.
Instagram hasn’t provided a full list of phrases and terms that will be highlighted, but basically holiday cliches. Try them and you’ll see it.
Oh, and a custom Like animation:
“Like your friends’ end-of-year stories to celebrate NYE, and see what happens.”
So a range of ways to celebrate the end of 2024, and the beginning of 2025 on IG, with some interesting feature additions which could end up sticking around beyond the festive period.
And definitely, a lot of people are going to be celebrating via the app this year. Social media usage always surges in the holidays, and as such, providing custom celebratory elements is a good way to encourage more engagement.
The new updates will be available from this week in the latest version of IG.
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