Alright, this is either an exciting or an annoying update, depending on your personal perspective. Alright, that might be a bit of a highly constricting spectrum, but really, there’s very little to suggest an in-between here. Recently, in a Broadcast Channel chat with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Instagram Chief Adam Mosseri announced that you can now post GIFs in Instagram comments.
See You in A GIF
As seen in recent, official screenshots, users can now search and share Giphy GIFs in the comment stream, providing another way to respond to Instagram posts. Honestly speaking, what’s more surprising is how this wasn’t an option from the get-go – at least since Facebook got Giphy. Mosseri did also note that it’s ‘a bit of a “finally” feature’.
What’s even more unusual is when you consider that Instagram added the capacity to reply to Stories with GIFs back in 2020, while you can also use GIF stickers within Stories themselves, so interacting via GIFs has been a thing on Instagram for some time. There is a single caveat, however – it’s not for comment streams, although Instagram has also worked to keep its comments as clean and text-based as possible, with no linking options or other tools.
GIFs are nothing new, while memes have recently spiked in popularity and prevalence over the past couple of years. So while this isn’t really an ‘update’ or ‘addition’, there’s likely some opportunity to be had here, at least in terms of improving engagement and interaction, which, fortunately, is the name of the game right now. At most, you can look up what GIF people often reply with and maybe create your own compendium for use in the feature, it may just get you the extra bit of engagement needed to be relevant, if not noticed, at the very least.
The Wrap
Now, you’ll likely see twitching images of reaction GIFs whenever you scroll down. This could facilitate new creative capacity, and provide more ways to engage with fans. It’s not a major shift by any means, nor is it something novel – GIFs are available in comment threads in most other apps. We’re not sure just how much utility this adds, but there’s likely to be some consideration here. After all, Adam Mosseri did once already say that Instagram’s recent developments are mostly based on internal data and trends, which do indicate what users want to see and what they do in the app.
NOTE: You must update to the latest version of the app to use GIFs in comments.
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