After a month of testing, the photo and video-sharing social network Instagram releases an interactive questions sticker to Stories.
What it does, is allowing users to submit questions for their friends to answer. To do this, users need to add a question sticker to their Story by selecting it from the sticker tray, after taking a photo or video. By default, the sticker is white. But users can change this by tapping one of the colors underneath the sticker to select other colors.
Users can also rotate, resize and drag the sticker around the screen to best fit their taste.
Unlike the poll stickers and emoji sliders, which allow users to "vote" on questions, the question sticker allows users to submit any questions for others to answer.
So basically here, both the user and the followers have more control of the context.
When their friends see the sticker, they can tap on it to reply. They can also reply as many times as they want, right from the sticker.
Users that asked the question, will see their friends' responses in their Story’s viewers list.
"It’s a fun new way to start conversations with your friends so you can get to know each other better," said Instagram announcing the feature.
"Along with the polling sticker and emoji slider, the questions sticker gives you another easy way to get closer with all of your friends on Instagram."
The primary use of this question sticker is for users to create Q&A with their followers. It also works as a way to get recommendations. And when combined with geofilters, it's similar to Facebook's requests for recommendations.
With the feature available in Stories, it joins Polls, Questions, Music, Mentions, Hashtags, and others.
Here, Instagram is basically making its ephemeral format a priority than anything else on its platform that isn’t a video.
This is exceptionally true as Instagram hasn’t been shy about its focus. What's more, CEO of parent company Facebook Mark Zuckerberg has proclaimed that Stories are a focus for the future.
While it does get a lot of engagements, many people have commented that the question sticker feature has cluttered Stories on the platform. Many have been reporting that it's dominating the content people are making about their lives.
The questions sticker is available starting Instagram version 52 on both iOS and Android.