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Instagram’s link stickers are rolling out to everyone

Instagram’s link stickers are rolling out to everyone

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They can add links in Stories posts but not your feed

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The stickers appear in Stories posts, and can link out to external sites.
The stickers appear in Stories posts, and can link out to external sites.
Image: Instagram

Instagram’s link stickers, which let you include hyperlinks in Stories in the form of stickers, will now be available to everyone on the platform, the Facebook-owned social media network has announced. Instagram started testing link stickers in June, but until now the feature has been limited to verified accounts or accounts with a large number of followers. 

According to the social network, link stickers are useful for anyone from businesses linking out to their products to activists linking out to external resources. But Instagram concedes that anyone can benefit from link sharing to engage with their followers. It also says that accounts repeatedly sharing misinformation or hate speech will lose access.

The successor to the swipe up

To add a link, head into the sticker tool from the top navigation bar after uploading content to your story, tap the “Link” sticker and enter the desired URL. It then functions like any other sticker on a Stories post.

When it announced the link stickers feature in June, Instagram stressed that they’re only meant for Stories posts and said it had no plans to bring them to the main Instagram feed or other parts of the app. That remains the status quo today.

The link stickers feature has now entirely replaced “swipe up,” which was how Instagram users could previously link out to external webpages from their Stories, and which the platform discontinued in August. But with today’s news, link stickers are now more widely available than swipe up ever was, since the old feature was only available to verified accounts or accounts with more than 10,000 followers.