Instagram Launches Live Test of New ‘Flipside’ Alternative Engagement Space
After experimenting with it over the past few months, Instagram has now rolled out its new “Flipside” alternative profile option to a small subset of users.
As you can see in these screenshots, shared by social media expert Matt Navarra, Instagram’s “Flipside” option provides an alternative profile space which is only accessible to you and your chosen connections.
Once you’ve created a Flipside, you can then select it as your post audience, meaning your post will only go to that space. You can then visit and view your Flipside as an alternative profile gallery, where you can also add a new profile name and picture, if you choose.
It’s another way for IG to lean into more private sharing, which has been a key trend of note in social apps of late. Fewer people are now posting to their public feeds, with more preferring to maintain smaller, closer knit engagement communities, which Instagram, in particular, has noted as a significant shift.
Indeed, back in 2022, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said that IG users were posting a lot more to stories, and sending a lot more DMs, than they were posting to their main feed. As a result, Instagram has since added inbox Notes to encourage private interactions, collaborative collections of IG posts that can be shared with specific users, and DM Channels, where you can follow high profile users.
Flipside is another iteration of the same, which also expands on Instagram’s past experiments to enable multi-profile management, so you can have different personas in the app.
Will it be a winner? It’s hard to say, but I assume that it’s aimed at younger users, which Instagram really wants to keep a hold of, as they migrate to TikTok and Snapchat instead. Notes has proven popular with teens, and maybe, Flipside will as well, providing another means for IG to facilitate more engagement, in line with trends.
We’ll have to wait and see, as it’s not available to all users, in all regions, just yet.
We’ll keep you updated on any progress.
