Today Instagram has announced some new features, including Repost, which is basically Twitter’s Retweet. You can repost public reels and feed posts, and your reposts will be recommended to your friends and followers in their feeds. Reposts will also be found in a separate tab on your profile so you (or someone else) can always go back and revisit them.
Reposts are credited to the original poster. So when your public reels and posts are reposted by someone else, they’re recommended to that person’s followers, even if those people don’t follow you. Thus, you have “a new opportunity to reach more people whenever you create something worth sharing”, Instagram says.
You can add a note to any repost by typing into the ‘thought bubble’ that appears on screen once you’ve hit the repost icon.
Next up, a feature that Instagram copied from Snapchat, not Twitter – the Instagram Map. This lets you opt into sharing your last active location with the friends you pick. You can turn it off at any time, and open the map to see content your friends and favorite creators are posting from “cool spots”.
Instagram bills this as “a new, lightweight way to connect”. Location sharing is off by default, and you can choose who you share it with (friends, Close Friends, or only selected friends). You can also choose not to share your location in specific places or with specific people.
If you use location sharing, your location is updated when you open the Instagram app or when you return to it if it’s been running in the background. If you’re a parent with supervision set up for a teen, you can control their location sharing experience – you’ll get a notification if they start sharing their location, and decide whether they have access to location sharing on the map as well as see who they’re sharing their location with.
Regardless of whether you’re sharing your location, you can see location-tagged content on the map, including reels, posts, and stories from people you follow, as well as notes from people you mutually follow. All of this is available for 24 hours. You can find the map at the top of your DM inbox. This is currently rolling out in the US, with “more global availability soon”.
Finally, there’s a new Friends tab in Reels, showcasing public content your friends have interacted with or recommendations from Blends you’ve started. Instagram says this will “help you see which reels the people you care about most are creating and engaging with”. Friends started rolling out earlier this year, and is now launching globally.