Meta has announced six new features for the messaging functionality on Instagram. These new features are the ability to edit messages, pin chats at the top of the inbox, turn read receipts on or off, mark stickers as favorites in a chat, and reply to messages with photos, videos, voice messages, GIFs, and stickers, and new themes for chats.
Editing messages
Let’s start with the ability to edit messages. Meta says that you can edit a message on Instagram up to 15 minutes after sending it. This feature will come in handy to fix a typographical mistake in a message or if you want to edit the message to make it sound better, add details, remove details, and other such reasons. To edit a message on Instagram, press and hold the message that you want to edit and select the ‘Edit’ option.
Pinning chats
Coming to the ability to pin chats, doing so, as you might know, places the chat at the top of the messaging section, making it easy for you to find and access a chat. Meta says that you can pin up to three 1:1 or group chats. To pin a chat, press and hold the chat that you want to pin or swipe left on that chat and select the ‘Pin' option.
Turning off read receipts
When you send a message to someone on Instagram and they read it, the app shows you a note below the message saying that the other person has read the message, and vice versa. While this is a very useful feature, some people don’t want others to know that they have read the messages.
Well, for those people, Meta has now added the ability to turn read receipts off. You can turn off read receipts for all chats or selected ones. To turn it off for all messages, go to Settings » Messages and story replies » Show read receipts and turn off the feature.
Marking stickers as favorites and replying with photos, videos, and more
Stickers are a great way to express your feelings and emotions in a conversation. However, with so many stickers available on Instagram, it becomes quite cumbersome to find the ones that you use the most. To address that, Meta now lets you mark stickers as favorites in a chat. Once you mark a sticker as a favorite, it will appear at the top of the sticker section, allowing you to access the ones you love easily every time.
One of the best messaging features on Instagram is to send a message by quoting another message in the chat. Well, that feature is getting an upgrade. Now you can reply to a message with photos, videos, voice messages, GIFs, and stickers, making it easier for you to converse with someone. To reply using the new options, press and hold a message, select the ‘Reply' option, and select the kind of media you want to reply with.
New chat themes
Instagram allows you to change the theme of a chat. Now, Mets is adding multiple new chat themes to the platform, including Love, Lollipop, and Avatar: The Last Airbender. Meta has started rolling out these features with the latest versions of the app for each platform (Android and iOS). So, make sure to update the app to the latest version.
