A few months after launching Stories, Instagram today is beefing up its Snapchat competitor with a few new features.
First up, Instagram Stories now supports links. The feature lets you add a “See More” link at the bottom of a story that viewers can swipe up on, letting someone share a link to a song, website, or whatever else. This feature is currently in testing with verified accounts.
The addition of linking to Instagram Stories is a pretty big deal because links don’t work in actual Instagram posts. So with linking now in Instagram Stories, users now have a way to share links within the app. They’ll just have to keep in mind that the links will disappear in 24 hours like all other Stories.
Also new to Instagram Stories is support for mentions. With this feature, you can mention people in stores by typing “@“ followed by their username, and then that’ll appear underlined in your story. When you mention a user, they’ll be notified in Direct. Tapping the mention will let you view that person’s profile.
Finally, you can now take Boomerangs inside of the Instagram app. While Boomerang does have its own special app, you can now open Instagram’s Stories camera and use the format picker under the record button to switch to a Boomerang that you can then share to your Story.
These features are rolling out today as part of an update to the Instagram app, so keep an eye out for it.