Instagram is working to make discovering stories and pictures from locations more discoverable, this morning adding Location and Hashtag Stories to the Explore tab.
It’s pretty simple, if you’re looking at the explore tab and a friend uses a location stickers on their stories, you’ll see a new Story Ring with the location highlighted. Likewise if your friends include a Hashtag Sticker in their story you’ll see that notification on a story. You can also search within the Explore tab for locations and hashtags to find more relevant content.
Instagram is very much about trying to connect users to relevant content and this is another way to do it, but it’s also smart. Allowing users to search for location or hashtags such as for an event, or in a location you’re going to you can find out great information like how busy it is, if it’s raining and more.
The Location and Hashtag Stories features are launching seperately, with the Location stories on Explore going live today on iOS and Android in version 10.22 of the Instagram app, while Hashtag stories will be rolling out over the coming weeks. You can grab the latest version of Instagram from Google Play.
