Facebook held their annual F8 conference on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week and let the cat out of the bag on some Instagram goodness.

Instagram has become such a large and powerful platform over the last 5 years and it’s about to get more feature rich and popular than ever. Purists may argue that these features will be the downfall of IG and that it’s losing the core of what made it so special, but we disagree. Either way that’s not the point of this article, so let's get into the meat of it.

 

 

The highly sought after explore page that can skyrocket the following of an account is totally redesigned and will now allow users to browse content interests via a “channels” feature. The channels will be based on your personal tastes and likes, rather than the IG algorithm so you the user will be able to choose the content that you wish to engage with - be it “sports”, “Garyvee” or “star wars toys of the 80’s”.

It's also expected that the new explore page will also make it easier for users to find and interact with you business on Instagram. One can only presume this will involve the FB / Instagram MarTech. According to Instagram the new Explore page will be rolling out over the coming weeks.

 

According to the company’s internal research more than 100 Million Instagram users watch or share on Live every day and according to the data more and more want the real time video experience in smaller groups. Enter the Video Group Chat feature. Side note this will be a feature coming to the Facebook owned WhatsApp as well. Video chat will be available in Instagram Direct and will work for one-on-one and group conversations.

AR is everywhere, hey we even built it into the Pizzaville mobile app we designed - shameless plug. Now brands and individuals alike can use Facebook's AR Camera Platform to create their own 3D effects that can be used in Instagram. You will only be able to use the custom filters that brands and individuals create, if you follow them, marketing opportunity anyone?

 

This feature will  actually be available on both the Instagram and Facebook platform and will allow you to share a sticker of the Spotify song your listening to directly in your story. The sticker then becomes deep link to the Spotify app allowing your followers to listen to the song via their account with ease. In addition to Spotify, users will be able to share their GoPro footage as well. One can only presume that more integrations like this will come in the future.

Instagram is now filtering out bullying comments. According to Instagram, the new anti-bullying feature uses machine learning to identify language that’s intended to harass or upset people. When this type of language is identified, the offensive comment will automatically be removed. Users will be able to enable or disable this feature from settings page.

That’s it for now and you can catch the full F8 Keynote here.