Sharing your Election Day Excitement on ...

Instagram is rolling out a new feature to prompt increased voter participation in the US midterms, so with statistics revealing that younger people are less willing to get out and vote, it’s efforts could have a notable impact.

Instagram is adding a new set of story stickers which will allow users to share that they have cast their vote:

“Starting Sunday, you’ll be able to use a new “I Voted” sticker. Open the camera, take a proud selfie, tap the sticker icon and select the “I Voted” sticker from the tray. If your phone language is set to Spanish, you’ll see the “Yo Voté” version. After you use the “I Voted” sticker, your friends can tap the sticker in your story to find their polling location via Get to the Polls, a nonpartisan site.”
– Instagram-press.com

But this second feature is more interesting:

“On Election Day on November 6th, you will see a “We Voted!” story at the front of your stories bar when several of your friends post a story with the “I Voted” sticker. Simply tap the “We Voted!” story to see your friends’ voting excitement all in one place. This functionality is new to Instagram and provides a way for you to see the people you follow share a moment in Stories. We’re excited to bring this feature to the community in new ways in the future.”

– Instagram-press.com

This is exciting in that it’s a new feature within the app. The ability to create new stories based on the usage of a selected sticker brings up a chain of additional considerations for future stories, and even branded content. For instance, rather than tagging a brand, you soon might merely be able to use a sticker created by the brand – the brand would then get a notification and would be able to adjust such into a new highlight on their profile.

But the more important thing is that from a voter point of view, this type of peer sharing can be really useful in persuading others to vote.

How can I be sure about this?

Because Facebook had done a test like this in 2010, around 340k extra voters took part in the US congressional election because of the election-day Facebook message, which used a similar type of peer pressure to increase the participation.

That’s it. We hope you find this article helpful. Please leave a comment for us if you have any other questions about Instagram’s new feature.