Earlier today, Instagram announced a bunch of new features, including countdown stickers for Stories, music sharing, Live Q&As, and more, to celebrate the holiday season. The five new features will begin rolling out today and become part of the Stories and Live sections of the platform.
[jwplayer KlaiocWU]
Countdown Stickers
As the name suggests, these stickers will countdown to whatever you want them to. For example, maybe you’d like everyone to know that it’s only three sleeps until you have sausages for dinner. You can countdown to anything, it’ll let you.
You can even subscribe to your mates’ countdowns and share them in your own stories. To make one, go to the sticker tray and tap on Countdown, then customise that shit and whack it on top of a photo or video. It’ll stay in your stickers until the countdown expires.
Music for Questions
You can already ask questions in Stories, but now your mates can respond with music. As an example, you could ask your followers what their favourite song to cook meatloaf to is and they can respond with an actual tune from the Instagram library. The obvious answer to that question is I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That) for reasons I’m sure you can understand.
To get to the music questions, just go to where the other questions stickers are. It’ll be in there, waiting for you.
Music Camera Effects
The music section of the Stories camera can now respond to music and sounds. You’ll get some new options for the effects you can use, all of which react to beats, sounds, music, etc.
This is a camera effect, so you’ll find there across the bottom with the others.
Live Q&A
You can now respond to question stickers in live videos if that’s something you’re into. If you go to your mate’s story and type a response to their question. If they go live to answer it, you’ll see a “Q&A” stamp in your Stories tray at the top of the app so you can jump in and watch.
Photo and Video Sharing in Live
If you feel like sharing some of your own content while doing a live broadcast, you can. To do it, start a live video and tap the gallery button to pull up your photo library. To reveal something to your audience, just swipe left on it, tap on anything you want to go full screen and the screen will adjust horizontally or vertically to accommodate the content.
That’s it, folks. Have fun with your new Instagram features.
