We know that Instagram is interested in facilitating shopping on its platform. In fact a recent report even suggested that Instagram could potentially be looking to launch a separate shopping app. While that has yet to happen, Instagram has announced new shopping features that will be coming to Stories and its Explore tab.

Hashtags are great for searching through the endless posts on your favorite social media networks. You can quickly see all of the posts on a particular topic just by tapping on the hashtag. Instagram says that hashtags are being used for finding illegal drugs on its platform in addition to finding support for addiction and substance abuse. It will now start pointing users towards help for opioid or substance abuse […]

On Instagram, users can tag their friends in photos. All you have to do is tap on the photo, type in their username, and you’re good to go. Unfortunately tagging in video has not been possible, at least not directly. Instead what users have been doing is tagging their friends in the caption of the video instead.

Sometimes double tapping a photo is a good way to let someone know you’ve seen their post and liked it. However if you wanted to do more, you could always leave a comment. While dropping comments aren’t that difficult, Instagram has made it a lot quicker and easier by introducing emoji shortcuts.

The internet can be a dangerous place to navigate, especially those who are younger and might not know any better, or who might not be emotionally equipped to handle certain situations online. This is especially true on social media where we have seen instances of cyberbullying, harassing, and abusive messaging.

Given how many brands and companies use Instagram to advertise their products, it wasn’t surprising that eventually Instagram brought a feature to its platform that allowed users to shop within the app. Now it looks like they’ll be taking it one step further by launching a standalone shopping app.

It’s pretty common for social apps these days to have support for two-factor authentication. That’s what made it particularly surprising that despite having more than one billion monthly active users, Instagram has only just added support for two-factor authentication apps. It’s a standard security feature that has eluded the Facebook-owned photosharing service for an unreasonable amount of time.

Instagram has a feature that shows a blue tick next to the user’s account to indicate that they have been “verified”. This is usually given to celebrities and brands to indicate that these accounts are indeed who they say they are, but exactly how Instagram decides who to give the verification badge to has never been quite clear.

Instagram is a good place if you’re trying to follow your favorite celebrities. It can also be a good place to draw inspiration from if you’re looking for design ideas, photography, architecture, and so on. Now it looks like Instagram is testing out a way that will allow college students to find each other on social media.

In a bid to try and introduce some digital wellness to its app, Instagram rolled out a feature last month which would tell users when they’ve reached the end of their feed, informing them that they’ve been caught up with all the latest posts. The idea is that it would try to get users to spend less time on the app to prevent addiction.

Instagram brought the poll sticker to Stories in October last year and it had added similar features over the past few months. The photo-sharing network now also offers an Emoji slider and the Questions sticker. The polls could only be posted publicly in the past but the Facebook-owned service is now allowing to send polls privately through direct messages.

It appears that hundreds of Instagram accounts have been hacked en masse since the beginning of this month. The method of these hacks is actually quite similar. It’s unclear at this point in time what vulnerability is being exploited to hack hundreds of Instagram accounts or if it’s a data dump from somewhere that’s aiding the hackers with credentials that are being used to compromise these accounts.

Instagram displays ads in between the news feed and also in its Stories. It’s how the company makes its money. These ads are also targeted which means that these are ads that Instagram thinks you might like based on a number of factors. However recently it seems that quite a few are taking offense to Instagram’s ads for an app called Facetune.

Many online services are jumping on the time well-spent bandwagon. They’re building tools that give their users more insight about the time that they spend on their services. Facebook was working on a similar feature for its social network and Instagram as well. The company today announced that these new tools are now live.