Instagram’s ‘Blend’ lets friends share Reels; influencers see audience surge

The tool allows users to stream content together and discover new content based on shared interests.

“We are announcing a new feature called Blend, which is a shared feed of reels with either a friend or even a group of friends in DMs. We want Instagram to be a place where people connect over creativity, so this is one more way to do that,” Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, announced in a reel on 17 April.

Influencers see growth potential

The platform’s latest feature has influencers excited about a potential surge in exposure and followers. By extending content visibility to their followers’ friends, creators anticipate significantly higher reach.

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“Blend can be beneficial and lead to a growth in followers. Based on my strategy and content plan, I would expect an estimated growth of around 15–25% over the next few months, depending on consistency, engagement, and campaign performance,” said Anishi Gupta, a content creator with over 100,000 followers on Instagram. Gupta added that this can especially push the growth of emerging creators.

However, this feature is limited to Direct Messages, that is, personal chats and group chats. Creators wish it were extended to their community channels for them to strengthen the bond with their followers.

“We creators actively work on building a strong community to sustain and grow engagement. This feature could really help in that, if we were able to share our feeds with our channel members,” said Harish Solanki, an influencer with 289,000 followers on his Instagram, where he creates biking-related content.

“I watch a lot of biking and travel-related content for my research and most of my community members on my channel Kalakaar’s updates follow me for bike-related content and relate to it. I would love to share the reels I watch with my followers on that channel to build a connection with them,” he added.

An email sent to Meta, parent of Instagram, enquiring whether creators will get access to synchronized feeds through Blend in their community channels in the future remained unanswered till press time.

Brands, marketers eye new opportunities

Even though this feature is very new for brands to adopt, marketers are already exploring ways to leverage Blend for campaigns, including targeted content and contests wherein winners can share feeds with celebrities or influencers.

Popular marketing influencer Aarti Samant, better known as The Sorted Girl, posted a video on her handle about how brands could use this feature. She suggested that brands launch a “blends only” sale, where the loyal customers get access to a special discount when they watch the brand’s content with one of their friends and share a screenshot of it with the brand or create a secret preview collection in a similar fashion.

Marketing agencies have already started crafting different ways to pitch to their clients on how they can use this feature in campaigns.

“Since this new feature focuses on shareability of content, it will be very suitable for boosting the large-scale campaigns that brands are carrying out. They will focus on creative storylines as the algorithm will be showing similar feeds to a wide variety of audience, so if one viewer likes an ad, the sane will be recommended to their friend,” said Kshitij Sharma, co-founder of influencer marketing agency PyroMedia.

“This will generate more targeted and relatable content for sub communities of users from the brand to get exposure to their friends. For instance, content wooing cricket viewers, will also be shown to their friends so brand will create cricket related content to get a wider exposure,” he added.

Brands can also leverage the popularity of their brand ambassadors and celebrity or influencer-endorsers to lure more users in through Blend.

“Brands can run contests that give winners access to a joint feed with celebrities that work with the brand after shopping from the brand for a certain amount. More buyers will be drawn in just to get an exclusive opportunity to have a combined social media feed as of a celebrity in this star-struck country,” said Vaishnavi Rathi, co-founder of social media strategy and marketing agency PR Socials.

Some creators, however, are sceptical about this new feature and feel it is premature for them to decide if it can be beneficial to them in the long run.

“It (Blend) is at a very early stage. I am still evaluating if this is something that can help and I feel it will mature with time and maybe then it can be a good proposition. Testing it out will make us decide that,” said Arsh Goyal, a coding creator with over 467,000 followers on Instagram.