Instagram has interactive stickers that you can add to stories. The stickers allow you to add polls, ask questions, and as of recently, invite users to a chat group. The Instagram Chat sticker lets anyone viewing your story request to join a conversation. Since the story will be viewed by several people, they will all be able to request to join the conversation and it will be a group chat. Here’s how it works.
Open Instagram and tap the camera button at the top left, or just swipe right. Capture either a photo or a video, it’s up to you. On the editing screen, tap the sticker button and look for the ‘Chat’ sticker. Tap it to add it to your story.
You can give your chat thread a name which is something you should do if you’re looking for better engagement. There will be a color wheel button at the top which, when tapped, will change the color of the Chat sticker. When you’re done, share the image to your Story or share it with a group of friends.
If your story is public, anyone and everyone who sees it will be able to request to join the chat thread. It will be up to you to allow or disallow someone from joining the chat. Your story may be public but chats are still private.
As mentioned earlier, the chat thread will be a group chat if more than one person requests to join it. This is important to remember because whatever conversation you have, you will be having it with multiple people. It is not a one-on-one conversation.
Instagram stories expire after 24 hours but the chat thread is going to stick around. It does not have an expiry date. You can delete it like you can any other chat thread but that doesn’t delete the conversation for other people. They can still continue it.
This feature is in the process of being rolled out. If you do not see it in your sticker drawer, and the search doesn’t bring anything up, give it a few days and it should appear. In the meantime, there are a few other interactive stickers that you can try. The poll sticker is pretty good if you want to engage with whoever is viewing your story. Other interactive stickers allow you to ask viewers a question, allow them to ask you a question, or just add a countdown to an event and have users come back for more content later.
