Instagram Tries Out ‘Reshare’ Button To Boost Engagement

Instagram is testing a new feature that will let users promote other people’s content by allowing account holders to add a “reshare” button on top of their stories, posts and videos, Bloomberg reported.

Adding this label will allow users to see a list of posts they have viewed in the past hour, or saved/posted themselves, according to Bloomberg.

Instagram Head of Product Vishal Shah told Bloomberg the photo-sharing platform wants to make reposted content more attractive to audiences, who usually want to see original posts in Instagram stories.

“We think reshares are important,” Shah said. “We think they should still exist, but we think people should be really deliberate about when they use them.”

Instagram announced last month it was experimenting with giving users the ability to add links to stories, something that’s now only available to businesses, users with verified accounts, or users with high numbers of followers.

As Bloomberg noted, adding links could give Facebook and Instagram users the chance to spread misinformation.

“During the pandemic, social media influencers spread doubt about the COVID-19 vaccines for a full year before Facebook took significant action,” Bloomberg reported. “Coronavirus disinformation was particularly pronounced on the social media sites, where posts that spark emotions have a better chance of being seen by more users.”

Facebook has since begun cracking down on misinformation related to the pandemic, according to Bloomberg. In May, the company announced it had removed more than 18 million Facebook and Instagram posts for violating its coronavirus misinformation rules.

Shah told Bloomberg Instagram will evaluate the spread of misinformation as it experiments with the new feature.

This news comes two weeks after reports that Instagram was preparing to launch an Exclusive Stories function that would be similar to Twitter’s Super Follow feature. The feature would apparently be available solely to creators.

As PYMNTS reported earlier this year, the platform is also considering other monetization options, such as a marketplace that would match brands with creators whose work fits their target markets.