Instagram Testing Expanded Story Audience List Features

One of the more unique quirks about Instagram this far in the platform's life is that, on the whole, the organizational tools for content are pretty nonexistent or, even then, temporary at best.

A person holding a cell phone in their hand. Photo by June Aye

Aside from organizing past stories at the top and collages in the moments, not to mention a whole tab for reels, there’s really no central album hub or a way to create customized galleries of content. Try scrolling through some of your old content to see what we mean; if you’ve posted for more than a couple of years, and mildly often at that, best of luck seeing your best, past content in a relevant way.

But one can dream about improving archival content and, as for the aforementioned “stories” feature, a new set of options is being rolled out in a beta test to see what works for curating your content for specific audiences.

Riffing on the “close friends” list concept and borrowing somewhat from the channels feature, Instagram is testing out a new story option that lets creators target content to specific followers that are part of that list, Endgadget reports.

In many ways, this kind of feature makes a lot of sense and for people beyond influencers and the like. A few years back, it was a trend on Instagram for people to have a second account that was more private and only shared with friends and this list feature seems to be an echo of that in spirit. No doubt it is easier to manage one account instead of two and with such targeting abilities it will make it easier for Instagram users to generate relevant content instead of using the current spray-and-pray policy that pushes stories now.

What other organizational tools do you think a platform like Instagram needs? Let us know in the comments.

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[Engadget]