Introducing Better Previews of Your Content, Outside of Instagram

By  

Harsh Shah, Product

December 17, 2021

Today, we’re announcing several new updates that will improve the ways your content can appear outside of Instagram. We heard your feedback and want to make it easier for you to grow your audience and get discovered by better previewing your content in more places.

Image previews will now appear in your Tweet when sharing Instagram posts from public accounts to Twitter. This highlights your content and shows people what they’ll see when they click your link. Our goal is to create a better experience for people who want to see a preview of Instagram content while scrolling on Twitter.

An example of Instagram content shared on Twitter.

How Instagram previews on Twitter work

In order to see a preview of an Instagram post on Twitter, the Instagram account needs to be public, whether it’s your own or someone else’s. If you write a Tweet and include a link to a public Instagram post, an image preview will be shown as a Twitter Card with a thumbnail in the Tweet. If you choose to share to Twitter from Instagram, the caption from the post will appear in addition to the image preview.

Clicking the link of the preview on Twitter will bring you directly to the post on Instagram. All types of Feed posts, like Photos, Videos, Carousels and Reels, will preview when shared to Twitter. Stories won’t show up as previews on Twitter for now.

More ways to discover your Instagram content

In addition to sharing previews on Twitter, you can also embed your Instagram profile on a website. We’ve enabled posts from public accounts to be embedded on external websites in the past – now, you can share previews of your profile and up to six of your most recent images to encourage people to view more. This will be first available in the United States, and we’ll look to expand to more countries soon.

An example of an Instagram profile embedded onto a website.

Embeds are great for creators who want to cross-promote on websites outside of Instagram, and for publishers who want better ways to showcase profiles to their readers.

To embed an Instagram profile on web:

  • Go to the profile you want to share.
  • If it’s your profile, click the gear icon. If it’s another profile, click the •••.
  • Click “embed,” then “copy embed code.”
  • Copy and paste the code into your website to display a profile preview.

We know it’s important for you to be able to control where your Instagram content shows up. You can choose whether your public posts or profile can be embedded on websites outside of Instagram using a new control for embeds, available in settings. This setting will also only be available to people in the United States to start.

An example of opting in via settings in your Instagram account.