This week Instagram has given their Laptop and Computer users a new experience within their site with the addition of DM’s and Live Streams. Since the Stay at Home Orders have come into affect, communication and entertainment has been at the forefront of everyone’s minds, including Instagram’s. With this new change, users that don’t have Instagram as an app on their phone are allowed to Direct Message other people now as well as tune into their favorite persons live streams whenever they go live. This is huge for Instagram because before this week, only mobile App users had access to everything the site offers, but now everyone does if they want it. This new desktop version offers you features that aren’t considered when using the mobile version such as the live chat is off to the side and so are the comments. This is awesome because even though the desktop view is compressed like it is on mobile, you don’t get half the video blocked due to the live chat scrolling on the bottom half of the screen. Personally knowing this now, I am going to use the desktop version whenever I watch a live now due to the chat bar not being in the way.
Another great feature of the desktop update is the promotability you gain with desktop. Before if you wanted to share a link to your live, it wasn’t possible. Now that lives are compatible with desktop, the creators are able to copy and paste the link from the desktop and put it anywhere they want for fans to click on and tune into the stream. In my opinion this is huge and I am sure that a lot of influencers who use Instagram a lot are extremely happy with this new update. All in all, kudos to Instagram. They have finally figured out a way for people to promote themselves past their profile and it covers all mediums of consumption.
John Marano's Digital Marketing Blog 