Instagram Rolls Out Hidden Valentine’s Day Features: How to Use Them

Instagram has added new features to add some flair to your Valentine’s Day celebrations. There are two new features that have been rolled out by the Meta-owned social media platform, but they are not very easy to discover. These hidden features can only be triggered with specific actions inside the Android or iOS app. One of the features can be found in the Notes section on the direct messages (DM) page. The second hidden feature has been added to Instagram Stories.

The first feature is a floating or exploding hearts animation, which can be seen when using the Notes feature. Users who add Valentine’s Day-related keywords in the Notes such as “Happy Valentine’s Day”, “Happy Vday”, or “Vday” in Notes will get a DM message that will trigger the floating hearts all over the screen. The same effect can also be seen by tapping on a note with Valentine’s Day-themed words.

The second feature is available in Stories. When you add a new story, you can select a special @mention in the stickers section. The new mention is pink in colour and comes with two hearts on each side of the mention. Using it to tag another person and then posting the Story will trigger a similar floating hearts animation. Similarly, tapping on another user’s story with this mention will again trigger the animation.

While the features have been rolled out and some users have reported using them, it is not yet available for all users. While the features are being introduced on the occasion of Valentine’s Day, they will remain in the app until Thursday, according to the company.

The Meta-owned platform is also experimenting with artificial intelligence (AI)-based features lately. Recently, a report highlighted that Instagram is working on an AI message-writing feature that will allow users to rewrite, paraphrase, and make stylistic changes to their written messages in chats. While the feature itself is tipped to be known as Write with AI, it appears to work more like an editing tool. The full functionality of this feature is not yet known.