Thunderbolt Digital are a professional digital agency in Surrey whose social media team make a habit of staying as up to date as possible so we can best assist our clients and stay ahead of the ever-shifting curve! The latest news we have to share with you is that of Instagram’s new comment features, which allow account greater control over who can leave comments on their photos.
With more daily active users (250 million) than Snapchat’s entire user base, Instagram are one of the fastest growing social media platforms, having recently surpassed 800 million users, and it seems that it won’t be too long until it finds itself with over a billion!
With so many people using Instagram, it’s natural that tweaks and changes would be made to make things more user friendly; one thing in particular that celebrities and public figures have been calling for is more control over comments, and it seems that Instagram has listened to their pleas by adding a new feature that will allow users to decide who can and can’t comment on their photos.
Previously you could either allow or disable comments on Instagram completely, meaning either everyone could comment on your posts, from a private user to a digital agency in Surrey, or no one could. It’s easy to see how this could result in bullying and harassment, as users wanting to engage with the more social aspect of the app would understandably want to keep their comments open. This new option, however, will let users limit commenting to accounts that they follow or that follow them, giving them much greater control than they had previously.
It seems that this will be a much more welcome feature for users than Twitter’s extended character count appears to be, with the latter’s users complaining of the platform ignoring harassment problems in favour of superficial changes and aesthetics.
Instagram’s acknowledgement and potential fix for the harassment problem seems to be part of their “kindness” initiative, which sees the platform sharing both mental health resources and kindness stickers alike, a move made after Instagram was voted as one of the worst sites for teenager’s self esteem, with the brand looking to make the place more welcoming for one of their key demographics.
Even for a digital agency in Surrey, only time will tell if this proves to be successful in combating harassment on Instagram; in the meantime, what will it mean for businesses? Probably not all that much – any businesses looking to expand their online audience are unlikely to want to limit engagement opportunities, and can already use the block function for any problem users or trolls. This may change in future, but this update sets to be far more valuable to individual users on a personal level more than anything else, though the Thunderbolt team will be sure to keep an eye on how things progress!