Instagram’s emoji slider for Stories
You now have another way to poll friends who are flicking through your Instagram Story. The new emoji slider sticker lets you ask a specific question and then wait as friends slide an emoji across their screen to answer your question.
Instagram describes it this way on its
Info Centre: “The emoji slider lets you ask more nuanced questions when you want to find out how your friends feel about something — like how [hot] an artist’s new single is or how [spicy] they like their food.”
The sliding scale enables a user to ask their followers how much they like something instead of just giving them the “Yes/No” option of the existing poll feature in Stories. You can choose from a variety of emojis, which increase or decrease in size as followers slide them across the screen.
As the author of the Story, you can also see which users responded to the poll and how far they dragged the slider.
Is this good news for brands? Yes, marketers now have another way to get input from their brands’ followers. It’s also a way for followers to engage more deeply with brands.
WhatsApp’s new features for Groups
The platform has made a number of improvements to its Groups functionality, which has already been rolled out for Android and iPhone users.
You can now add a description under Group info that will show up in a new participant’s chat as soon as they are added to the group. Admins can now also restrict who can change the Group’s subject, icon and description.
A new catch up button has also been added, WhatsApp writes in
a blog post: “When you've been away from a group chat, quickly catch up on messages that mention or reply to you by tapping on a new @ button that appears at the bottom right corner of the chat.”
You can also search for group participants on the group info page and admins can remove admin permissions of other group participants.
Other awesome news is that “admins can now remove admin permissions of other group participants, and group creators can no longer be removed from the group they started,” WhatsApp announced.
While these improvements don’t directly benefit brands, they do offer a glimmer of hope that the soon-to-be-launched WhatsApp Business will provide companies with the same amount of control over the way users interact with them.
That’s a wrap.
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