Instagram’s adding some new elements to its inbox Notes feature, with video notes, as well as new engagement options, designed to help drive more spontaneous interaction in the app.
First off, there’s video Notes. Now, when creating a Notes in your IG Direct display, you’ll be able to include a 2-second, looping video, which will be visible to your mutual followers or Close Friends in their Notes tray for 24 hours.
Instagram chief Adam Mosseri first previewed the feature back in October:
As you can see in this example, video notes will enable you to add an animated element to your top-of-inbox prompts, which could inspire more engagement with your updates.
Instagram’s also adding new ways to respond to Notes, via audio, photo, video, GIFs, and stickers.
Within the updated response process, Note viewers will now have an array of options to reply to a Note with, which adds another way to enhance the process.
Notes has been a winner for the app, especially among younger audiences, a key demographic that IG really wants to keep engaged.
Because it is seemingly losing out to other apps. A recent survey conducted by Pew Research found that Instagram is now well behind YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat as the key platform of choice among teen users, with younger teens (13-14) being the least likely among this cohort to regularly use the app.
As such, Instagram’s looking to double-down where it can, and with teen users creating Notes at 10x the rate of non-teens, clearly it smells potential, hence the rising emphasis on Notes as a key connection option.
In other words, even if you don’t care for it, and never use it, it’s probably not about you, with Notes really aimed at driving more engagement among the youth i.e. you’re probably just too old to get it.