In a bid to reach an even larger audience, Facebook owned Instagram has added Stories to its Explore tab as well so that they can also be discovered in the Explore section.
Users can find the ‘Explore’ feed below the search bar while they navigate to the search tab. The feed allows the users to discover content from Instagrammers they don’t follow.
“To help people experience the full breadth of interest [sic] content on Instagram, the redesigned Explore grid will now feature Stories. In the same way that Explore recommends posts based on topics you’re interested in, the grid will now provide you with personalized Stories recommendations.”
The Explore section up till now had been including photos and videos published by users to their main feed but going forward it will also include stories and content from IGTV.
The Explore tab also includes separate tabs for shopping, food, art, travel, and more.
And if users click on these tabs let say if they click on the ‘shop’ tab , it will bring them to a new page that contain even more categories. The shop section includes shopping posts that uses Instagram’s new checkout functionality.
As revealed by Instagram, more than 50% of its users base use Explore every month. All the updates that we talked about right now were rolled out on Thursday this week except for Stories to be added in the Explore section as that may be accomplished in the coming weeks.