Instagram on Friday announced an update to DMs, its direct messages inbox, which will improve the experience for those who receive a lot of inbound messages, like creators and influencers. Now, the app is introducing tools that will allow users to sort and filter their “message requests” — meaning those messages that don’t arrive in their main inbox, based on controls the user sets.
The new tools will give users the ability to sort and filter these message requests by follower count, verified accounts, brands, creators, and other factors. This will help the creator better identify those higher-priority messages that may deserve a response because of the impact they could have on the creator’s business and relationships.
In addition, a new “Story Replies” folder will be added to make story replies accessible in one place.
The company said the changes are being introduced after hearing from creators around the world how managing their DMs can be difficult.
“Now when you go to the requests inbox, sometimes it can be really overwhelming,” said Instagram head Adam Mosseri, in a post on the social network. “So what we’ve done is added ways to filter down those requests to just see the ones that you’re looking for,” he continued. “There’s a lot more to do to improve the inbox for creators and requests,” Mosseri admitted. “But hopefully, this is one step in the right direction.”
The “Sort & Filter” options will appear in an overlay on top of the inbox, where users can choose to sort requests by their recency or by the number of followers the sender has, helping to highlight those messages that could be from other creators or brands reaching out about business deals. Plus, they can check or uncheck other options to further narrow down what’s displayed by factors like whether the account is Verified, a business, a creator account, those that have a certain number of subscribers, and more.
Instagram says it will continue to invest in DMs over time.
The changes follow other inbox-related improvements Meta made earlier this week to WhatsApp, which now allows users to filter their chats by customized lists.