Instagram introduced Stories last year as an answer to the hugely popular sharing format that was pioneered by Snapchat. Over time, it has grown to become more popular than Snapchat, which was expected since Instagram has a bigger audience than the former.
Now TechCrunch is reporting that Instagram is testing another feature: Location Stories. Location Stories have been spotted in the Explore tab, which was earlier updated with the ability to see Stories from people you do not follow.
At the time they discovered the new feature, you could access Location Stories by clicking on the location sticker on someone’s Story. When you click on these location stickers, you are given a carousel of the stories of the different Stories being shared of the particular location, and in this case, the one highlighted is of Times Square in New York City.
If Instagram finally rolls this out, it could mean more views for your Stories and if you’re a business, your Stories will be subjected to a wider audience which can then make Instagram serve ads ultimately on Stories.
On Snapchat, we used to have collaborative Live Stories which were great since we could see Stories made by people from a certain location. Nairobi was even featured twice during its run. However to remedy all that, they introduced Stories in Search earlier this easier so that you can search for over a million Stories within Search.
We now hope that Instagram makes this feature official later on for its 700 million users and you bet it will use the hashtag stickers they announced recently.