Early this year, we reported that Instagram had brought back the chronological feed. Now, the platform, in a move that mirrors the pinned tweet on Twitter, is testing a new feature that will let you pin a post to your profile. The pinned photo will appear above a user’s photo grid.
As the feature is still in the test phase, only select users currently have access to it. Those lucky users are seeing a “pin to your profile” option that they can select from the three-dot menu next to posts.
This introduction is bound to be a welcome one to those users who post hundreds of pictures but might want a specific one to be the highlight when someone visits their page.
The feature might also find some use for Instagram influencers, who might be paid by different brands to have a picture highlighting a specific product pinned for their followers to see and hopefully buy.
At the moment, users have the ability to pin stories to their profiles. This introduction will extend the functionality to posts. Users have been getting around the inability to pin posts in the past by highlighting the specific post in a story, then pinning that story to the profile.
This new feature removes the hoops you have to jump through as well as makes it intuitive and straightforward in highlighting your desired posts.
The pinned posts test comes a week after Instagram announced that they are removing the “Recent” tab on hashtag pages for some users as part of a small test.
At the moment, selecting a hashtag takes you to a page that has content published using the hashtag grouped into three categories: Top, Recent, and Reels.
Dropping the Recent category for some users is a way of focusing the attention on Reels, Instagram’s TikTok answer, as well as focusing on posts that receive the most engagement on the platform.
Whether the changes will have a positive impact on the Meta-owned platform is a case of waiting and seeing. But they are definitely coming up with more ways to ensure engagement is as high as possible on their platform.
