With stories being one of the main forms of communication on social accounts, Instagram has created another new function which should be a useful addition for business accounts. This new function highlights any Story that mentions your profile and enables you to easily re-share them into your own account’s Story stream. This is great for brand accounts that love to feature user-generated content like public shout outs and product testimonials.

How to use this new addition to Stories is simple. When going to create a new Story you will see the @ symbol at the bottom with the rest of your Create Mode options. When you click on this it will generate how many @mentions your account has at the top of the screen. When you tap on “See All” you see the thumbnails of each mention. From here, you can select the thumbnail you want to reshare. This story will remain on your account until the original story posted expires.

Showcasing relevant mentions is great for brand accounts. This allows you to show off your social proof from real customer accounts. This is also beneficial for influencer marketing partnerships and boosting engagement through linking accounts via @mention. So far it seems that this function is only available for business accounts on Instagram, confirmation from Instagram on whether or not they plan to extend this function to creator or personal accounts has not yet been announced.

In September, Instagram recorded a peak of 500 million accounts using stories as a the main form of communication. Instagram has also announced that they plan to explore more ways to amplify influencer content, this new Story feature seems to be a clear step in that direction. In addition to the popularity of stories for user communication, Story ads in general seem to gain higher traction than a paid ad that appears on the feed. For more help and direction for your own Instagram account contact us here or call us at 404.850.2081.