Instagram is expanding its Close Friends feature from Stories and Notes to feed posts and Reels. As such, you’ll be able to share Reels and feed posts with a smaller, perhaps more trusted audience instead of everyone who follows you.
The Instagram team says folks use Close Friends “as a pressure-free space to connect with the people that matter most.” By expanding the Close Friends option to Reels and feed posts, the developers hope you’ll have “more ways to be your most authentic self on Instagram while having more choices over who sees your content.”
Sharing a Reel or feed post only with Close Friends is pretty straightforward. When you’re creating one, hit the Audience button, select Close Friends and then tap Share. The post or Reel will have a green star label, so those on your Close Friends list who see it will know they’re part of an exclusive club.
To highlight the expansion of the feature, you might see the app’s plus button turn into a green star icon today.
It’s worth noting that the Close Friends list will be the same group of people across all Instagram features. However, Instagram has been looking at other ways for everyone to share things with smaller audiences.
Last month, Instagram head Adam Mosseri revealed that his team was experimenting with a way to let users share Stories with different subsets of followers. Facebook users have long been able to set up many different lists of friends and choose which one to share a post with.
