Instagram Stories Get the Best Feature You Can Think Of

By Mara Anton

Posted on June 30, 2021

Folks, it’s happening. Instagram is finally done playing favorites and is bringing ~~one of~~ the best story features around to all of us: Story Links.

After dropping a bomb on us with the desktop upgrades – publishing from your browser, edits and all – Instagram is giving normal users a break from the ubiquitous link in bio. It no longer matters if you have 10K followers or not, if you have a badge or not, you will be able to link to external sources from your Stories.

Small bloggers, business owners and activists will be the happiest to learn that they don’t have to resort to various workarounds to share their content or products. Instagram is definitely testing in-stories links, although they won’t be accessed by swiping up.

Instead, they’ll make it possible via sticker. You know how there are hashtag, questions, music, polls and other type of stickers easy to add from Insta Stories? Well, soon, you’ll see there the link sticker, too.

One thing Instagram will be wary of are links used to spread misinformation. Making the feature public to every single user of the platform will come with that risk, of course, and it’s the platform’s intent to stop that from happening. With this in mind, Instagram is testing the waters these days with global rollout “coming soon”.

This change was long overdue as well as the ability to post from your computer, bypassing Facebook’s glitchy Creator Studio and other scheduling third-party websites.

Instagram has been on a roll this year. Before catering to normal users, the platform made sure creators had plenty of incentives to stay, instead of fleeing to TikTok and other competing apps. One of those incentives was enabling influencers to get paid by brands directly through Instagram, while creator shops was another feature Mark Zuckerberg was contemplating.

As exciting as all of that sounds, let’s hope the social aspect of these platforms won’t be “forgotten” in favour of the networking and entrepreneurship potential they have.