Instagram launches new expression tools in the time of social distancing – testing a new ‘Challenges’ sticker and a ‘Stay Home’ AR collection in the Stories gallery
Testing ‘Challenges’ in Stories
Keeping up with the people you love on Instagram and interacting with them in fun, new ways is so important – especially during this time of social distancing. Starting today, we’re testing Challenges in Stories, which makes it easy to join challenges through a sticker, via the stories text tool, or from nominations from friends.
We’ve seen that challenges are a fun way to interact with your friends on social media and that people are using @mentions, text and hashtags to join popular challenges. Now, with this new sticker, you’ll be able to participate, nominate your friends, and keep the fun going! If you come across a challenge when watching other people’s Stories, you can join in simply by tapping on the sticker to try it yourself. Anyone can try a challenge, even without being nominated.
Alternately, when someone nominates you for a challenge, you’ll receive a DM saying your friend mentioned you in their story. After you tap into their story where you’re nominated, you can tap “Try This Challenge” to open the camera with a “Nominated by” challenge sticker. You can then share this to your own story and your nominator will be tagged in your story.
For this test, everyone will be able to participate in challenges, but only a limited number of challenges will be available.
‘Stay Home’ AR collection in the Effects gallery
A few weeks ago, we launched the ‘Stay Home’ and ‘Ghar Pe Raho’ stickers, allowing you to see how others are practicing social distancing at this time. We’re building on that effort to create a centralized experience to find effects promoting awareness, staying active, challenges, fun games and more as a way to help you stay connected with the people you love.
This includes the ‘Guess The Gibberish’ AR effect, along with others like ‘Drawin5secons’ and ‘’Name By letter…’. We will continue to update the “Stay At Home” collection with new effects.
To know more about Instagram’s efforts to keep people safe, supported and informed, click here.
