Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg today has revealed that a new Broadcast Channel feature will eventually be available on three of the company’s major social media services, with Instagram being the first to test it. According to the media-sharing platform‘s official tweet, the recently introduced function allows for creators to invite followers to join their public chat for announcements and updates, as well as interact with certain activities.
If all of this sounds familiar to you, that’s because Broadcast Channels are basically a copy of Telegram’s ability to create public channels. In essence, the functions offered are pretty much the same, where creators/administrators can both publicly and directly invite users to join their channels to stream updates to their follower’s inboxes. Similarly, communications are done one-way, only allowing the initiator to send out messages and host activities such as polling and so on. Channel participants, on the other hand, may only interact by reacting to the messages with emojis and also cast their votes in the aforementioned polls.
The new feature is currently in its testing phase and is only available to a small number of people including several celebrities and influencers, as well as Zuckerberg himself. In fact, you can actually join the Meta head honcho’s own channel on Instagram, which was created specially to demonstrate the new feature. However, keep in mind that Broadcast Channels can only be accessed through the platform’s mobile app, as it has not been implemented on the web version just yet.
📣 Get updates from your fave creators with broadcast channels 💬
We’re testing a way for creators to invite followers to join their public chat for announcements and updates, where you can read and react to messages and vote in polls 🙌 pic.twitter.com/mP5XfGFdoE
— Instagram (@instagram) February 16, 2023
Meta says it will be adding more functions to Broadcast Channel in the coming months, including the ability to bring another creator into the channel to discuss potential collaborations, collect questions for an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session via prompts, and more. The social media conglomerate also notes that the new feature will eventually be introduced to its other platforms in the near future as well, namely Facebook and Messenger.
(Source: Mark Zuckerberg / Meta [1] [2])
