Instagram Adds New ‘Notify’ Sticker to Help Creators Maximize Connection with Fans

Instagram has added a new “Notify” sticker for creators, which will provide another way to help keep their audience informed of when they post in the app.

As you can see in this example, using the new “Notify” sticker, creators will be able to prompt their audience to set a reminder to ensure that they see their upcoming posts in the app.

Once a viewer taps on the Notify sticker, they’ll then be able to choose which elements they get notifications about, which could be a good way to subvert common frustrations with the algorithm failing to feed your updates through to your audience.

Because as Instagram chief Adam Mosseri has reiterated this week, not everyone is going to see all of your update.

As per Mosseri:

“Nobody reaches all of their followers when they post, primarily for two reasons: One, a lot of your followers won’t open the app that day, and two, those who do log in have far more posts to see than they have time to spend, and don’t scroll down far enough to get to every post.”

Though, as I’ve argued previously, the latter logic here seems to contradict Instagram’s push to insert more AI-based recommendations from profiles that you don’t follow into your feed.

Like, if there are far more posts in your feed than you can possibly see each day already, adding in additional recommendations is only going to make that worse. Right?

In any event, the point is that your followers are not necessarily going to catch all of your updates, and this will provide another means to ensure that you’re maximizing reach to your most engaged fans, by giving them the option to opt-into alerts for specific content types.

Though you could already kind of do this with “Favorites”, which enables you to add up to 50 accounts that get higher display priority in your feed.

I guess, this is a more overt way to prompt your top fans to make your content a priority, and it could well be a good option to boost reach.