Instagram New Stories UI & Impact on Content Strategy

This will irritate marketers who have made Instagram Stories a priority.

Instagram has been testing a new Stories presentation UI that essentially hides Stories posts after a certain frame count for the past few weeks.

As shown in this screenshot from Content Strategist Claudia Flannery, some Stories are now only displaying the first three frames, with a tiny 'Show all' prompt in the top left corner of the screen.

Instagram Stories Frame Restriction

That would be easy to overlook, which could mean that if you post more than three frames to your Story, the later ones are much less likely to be seen.

According to Flannery:

"Obviously, this will result in a significant decrease in views and reach, as most people are unlikely to actively go and click to show all."

That, I believe, is correct; however, why would Instagram do so, and will this be made available to all users?

When we asked IG for clarification, it responded as follows:

"This feature is in its early stages of development and testing with a very small number of people."

So there's no real insight there, just confirmation that it's being tested.

My guess is that this is related to Instagram's Reels-first strategy, which has also resulted in the launch of a test of a new, full-screen UI that would combine feed posts, Reels, and Stories into a single stream.

As you can see, in this format, Stories would be displayed with the frame count along the bottom of the screen, indicating that users can swipe left to see more - and perhaps Instagram believes that including too many frames will be off-putting, taking users out of the vertical swiping experience.

Perhaps it's a technical limitation, and Instagram can't make it work above a certain frame count. In any case, if it is implemented, you can expect your Stories performance to suffer, particularly in the later frames that few people will manually tap through to see.

It appears to be the wrong path to take - but with Reels now being the key growth element on Instagram (Reels now account for more than 20% of the time that people spend on Instagram), perhaps this is just another subtle push from the platform to get people focused on Reels instead.

Perhaps that is all that is required – we don't know because Instagram hasn't provided us with any additional context – but, once again, it is in testing, and its impact on content strategies could be significant.

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