Instagram users currently only get the option to share a post or video with their story, which automatically disappears after 24 hours. With the new ‘resposts’ feature, users will be able to re-share old posts on their profile. A social media analyst tweeted about the feature and said that a new ‘Repost’ tab is coming to many profiles, which will show photos or videos reposted by the user.
Meta-owned Instagram will soon begin testing the ‘resposts’ feature for feeds, which has been missing from Instagram since launch despite being present on platforms like Meta’s own Facebook and Twitter. The feature was first spotted by social media consultant Matt Navarra, who shared a screenshot of Adam Mosseri’s Instagram profile, showing a Repost tab with an icon similar to Twitter’s ‘Retweet’.
A reverse engineer, Alessandro Paluzzi, later shared a snippet of what appears to be a splash screen for the ‘resposts’ feature test, with what’s new in the feature? It was stated. If you repost a post or reel to your feed using the ‘reposts’ feature, it will appear to your followers in a separate ‘reposts’ feed and you will receive comments on these reshared posts as messages.
Resharing a post isn’t entirely new to Instagram. The feature of resharing a post, story or reel has been around for a long time, but no one can reshare a post on their feed without using a third party app, at their own risk. With TikTok also having the feature of recreating videos, it seems like the time has come for Instagram to bring this feature.
Users will be given the option to share a post on their profile in the share menu. Apart from this, users will also be able to write their own caption or reaction on a post while re-sharing it, similar to what is currently available on Twitter with the ‘quote’ tweet feature. However, this feature has not been confirmed yet.
It has also been revealed that Instagram is scaling back many of its shopping features, shifting its focus to increasing e-commerce through direct advertising. Instead of buying a product from Instagram, the social media platform wants users to buy the product by viewing the ads displayed on the app. The report said that the internal staff of Instagram has also been informed about this change.