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Instagram is Experimenting With a New ‘Challenge’ Sticker to Prompt User Engagement

Instagram is experimenting with a new ‘Challenge’ sticker for Instagram Stories which would enable users to call on their followers to participate in easy to join challenges and competitions, prompting more engagement.
Instagram Challenge Sticker As you can see in these screenshots, the Challenge sticker would be added to the regular sticker tray in Stories. When added, you then you would be able to tags in your story to invite friends to participate. While as you can see down the bottom of the screen, there’s also an option to ‘search challenges’ within the hashtag field, based on trending content. Instagram is getting their inspiration from TikTok- On TikTok, users have the option to do a ‘Duet’ with another person video and have the two play side-by-side, which many use to reply to challenges and ultimately inputting interactive elements into the posts. But more importantly, challenges have played a huge role in the ecosystem of TikTok. On the TikTok’s Discover page, hashtags like #siblingcheck, #workdistractions, and more popular variations like #FlipTheSwitch have become key tools for inspiring interaction.
Instagram Challenge Sticker Each of the top trending hashtag challenges inspires millions, even billions of user responses, with people providing their takes on the same, and seeking to tap into the fun of the topic, while also potentially boosting their engagement. Instagram’s likely hoping to hook into that usage trend with its Challenge tool – though it does seem that it would be more confined on Instagram, given privacy settings and the way the Explore tab highlights content. On TikTok, there’s a real community feel to its Discover tab, which is more based around these types of tags, while on Instagram, Explore is more topic-focussed. Stories content is also not discoverable in the same way, while it also only exists for 24 hours, so it doesn’t seem like something that could become a big consideration on Instagram. But it may spur more engagement. Maybe user behavior on TikTok will spill across to Instagram Stories, and the Challenge sticker and inspire more interaction as a result. I mean, even if it only boosts engagement a little, it’s probably worth it.

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