After adding a shopping tab on the home page, Instagram seems to be working on a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) feature to help users quickly contact businesses and creators. With the FAQ section, creators can add a set of 4 predefined questions. These questions can be optionally displayed when a user initiates a chat with a business or creator.
The upcoming feature was first spotted by developer Alessandro Paluzzi in September. While it was previously limited to business accounts, Instagram has now started testing it with creator accounts as well.
#Instagram is working on a Frequently Asked Questions feature for Business accounts 👀 pic.twitter.com/pGkUDczMIH
— Alessandro Paluzzi (@alex193a) September 15, 2020
The new development, brought to attention by social media consultant Matt Navarra (via TechCrunch), shows the feature in action. Once available, the app will urge creators to set up FAQs to help people start conversations. Even if creators set up questions, there is a ‘Show Questions’ toggle to quickly control the visibility.
Instagram has rolled out FAQs feature to more users
h/t @thenezvm pic.twitter.com/eCbsjMCDEb
— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) November 23, 2020
While this feature is new to Instagram, Facebook Messenger has had a similar FAQ section for quite some time now. The new test shows how Instagram is continuing to adopt Messenger’s features. It follows the integration between Instagram Direct and Messenger from October that brought a handful of features including selfie stickers, chat themes, message reactions, and vanish mode to Instagram.
For now, it is quite early to tell when Instagram will widely roll out the FAQ option to all creators and businesses. Since the feature is already in beta testing, we could expect Instagram to formally announce the feature over the coming weeks. Whenever that happens, the feature will be appealing to businesses to stay in the loop with their customers’ queries.
