The lure of gaining followers on Instagram has people straining to put their posts in front of as many people as possible. And what’s the best way to do just that if you are not a celebrity? Well hashtag the hell out of your posts of course.
People clicking on innocuous hashtags such as #cat or #pokemon, have often found themselves facing totally unrelated images, thanks to smart folks using the most trending hashtags to adorn all sorts of random posts.
Of course, this also causes a fair amount of headache. Hashtags were meant to help people find stuff they like, and thanks to our crafty spammers, it’s not happening. Well, Instagram has finally caught on to the issue and if the rumor mill is to be believed, the company may be planning to separate captions (the playground for hashtag spammers) from……well, the place where you input hashtags.
According to a tip received by TechCrunch, Instagram’s android app code actually points to the possibility of a dedicated “Add Hashtags” option underneath the caption composer.
Separating hashtags from captions has the potential of letting Instagram bring an element of control. At the very least, it will separate hashtags from from captions and make the app less irritating. This way, Instagram could finally get people interested into it’s follow hashtags feature as well. Now again, this is all hearsay and Instagram could well scap this feature. But, it’s there and who knows, we might see the feature rollout someday soon.
Apart from this, Instagram could also be working on a geofencing feature that could potentially let Instagramers target their audience based upon their geography. Now this could prove to be very useful for someone who let’s say, is creating content for different geographies. You could potentially create a post in Chinese and have it visible only in China. You could then translate the post to english, publish it, and have it visible in only english-speaking geographies.
The third and final feature, which has also been confirmed to be under testing by Instagram, is story highlight stickers. With this feature, Instagram users can basically convert someone else’s story highlight from their profile into a sticker that can then be overlaid on their own story. What’s more, users can also add their own comments on top of these stickers.
Finally, the other feature that is confirmed to be undergoing tests. That’s right, the feature when it rolls out, would allow people to tag others within their videos.
Well, it doesn’t seem like Instagram is in any mood to let it’s dominance flag. And let no one say that all Instagram does is copy features off Snapchat. With Facebook’s deep pockets backing R&D, we could soon see Instagram come up with some totally original, awesome features.
