When your
feed and Stories trays go stale, or your follower count stops rising, you drift
away from Instagram . That’s why the app is rolling out two big new features
designed to connect you to new people and diversify your graph so there’s
always something surprising to look at and like.
Today
Instagram launches its QR Snapcode-style Nametags globally on iOS and Android,
after TechCrunch broke the news on the feature back in March and April. Though
not technically QR codes, they’re scanned like them to let you follow people
you meet offline. Here’s a look at how they work:
The
customizable codes are accessible from the three-line hamburger menu on your
profile. They can be scanned when other users tap and hold on your code through
the Instagram Stories camera or Scan Nametag button on your own Nametag to
instantly follow you. You can add colors, emojis or AR-embellished selfies to
your Instagram Nametag, show it off on your phone to help people follow you in
person, put it on your website or social media or message it to friends through
SMS, WhatsApp, Messenger and more.
It’s
actually surprising it took this long for Instagram to copy Snapchat’s
Snapcodes that debuted for profiles in 2015 and were later expanded to open
websites and unlock AR filters. Facebook Messenger launched its own QR codes in
April 2017, though it never quite caught on. But they make a ton of sense on
Instagram because it’s tougher to share links on the app, people often treat it
as their primary presence on the web that they want to promote and because
businesses are increasingly relying on the app for commerce. It’s easy to
imagine brands putting their Instagram Nametags on billboards and posters, or
buying ads to promote them around the web.
The school
communities feature harkens back to Facebook’s origins, when users could
actually set their privacy to show all their content to everyone in their
school. Here you won’t be able to instantly expose your private Instagram to
everyone from your school. You could imagine a freshman in college going
through their network to discover new potential friends to follow, or an alumni
seeking others from their alma mater in search of business or romance.
Instagram
relies on info users have publicly shared about their school and the people
they followed to verify if they were in fact a student or recent alumni of a
university. Rather than actively signing up, users will get a notification
prompting them to join the network. That’s a lot less reliable than using
university email addresses for verification like Facebook used to, but also a
lot simpler for users.
The company
does provide a tool for alerting it to misuse of the school communities feature
in case any sketchy older users are employing it as a stalking tool. Next to
each user’s name is an overflow menu of three dots where people can report
accounts they don’t think belong in a certain community.
The invite
method is reminiscent of the growth hacks that teen Q&A app TBH that
Facebook acquired was using. In what an internal memo called a “psychological
trick,” TBH scraped Instagram user profiles for school names, looking at school
location pages to find student accounts to invite them to join TBH. The teen
sensation was eventually shut down due to low usage; the memo called the tactic
too “scrappy” for a big public company, but now it’s found a home inside of
Instagram.
Today’s
launch is the first under Instagram’s new leader Adam Mosseri following the
resignation of the company’s founders. Critics are watching to see if Mosseri,
the former Facebook VP of News Feed and member of Mark Zuckerberg’s inner
circle, will push harder to drive growth and monetization for Instagram. Given
Instagram’s priority here is expanding its social graphs and keeping users
engaged, it seems willing to trade occasionally allowing or disallowing the
wrong people to reduce friction and juice growth.
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