After Instagram made every short-form video post a Reel, the company is looking for ways to make them easier to share. Instagram is now playing with a new feature that lets you view a list of Reels you recently shared — just in case they were so good, you want to spread them around even more.
TechCrunch first reported the news earlier this morning, citing a tweet posted by Turkish account Dijital Ağlar on March 5. The tweet includes a screenshot of an Instagram interface, which shows a brief list of thumbnails of the different Reels this particular viewer had recently shared.
It seems that the goal for Instagram is to make it easier for users to share Reels — if you share it once with somebody, the hope is you’ll want to share it again with someone else. TechCrunch pointed out that the thumbnails also include avatars in the bottom right, which corresponds to the profile picture of the person you last shared it with.
Instagram is testing showing the latest posts you send to a friend as a preview.
cc/ @MattNavarra
(iOS – Latest version – Türkiye) pic.twitter.com/0dd27PODaH
— Dijital Ağlar (@yousufortaccom) March 5, 2023
“We’re rolling out improvements to how you can search for and rediscover Reels that were previously shared in messages,” Meta told TechCrunch. The company did not immediately return Gizmodo’s request for comment on the feature or when it may be released.
Instagram, the app known for photos, has been paying extra attention to video for quite some time now, with the release of IGTV dating back to 2018. The company seems to be putting in a lot of effort to make Reels — its TikTok copycat — more popular, especially since internal documents at the company published last fall revealed that “most Reels users have no engagement whatsoever.” Last week, Meta announced that it would no longer pay influencers for getting views on Reels, a payment program that saw some creators making anywhere from $US600 ($833) to $US35,000 ($48,587) for the content they produced.