Instagram Increases Reels Duration, Adds New Features: Details

Instagram is launching new features for Reels to help creators engage with their audience better. The social media platform is increasing the duration of Reels to 90 seconds from 60 seconds. It is also making interactive stickers available for Reels that were only present in Instagram Stories earlier. Also, users can now import their own audio to Reels to add commentary and background noise. On the audio front, Reels now gets fresh sound effects like air horns, crickets, and more. Recently, Instagram had also launched Amber Alerts to help find missing children.

Meta-owned social media platform, Instagram, has announced on its blog through a blog post that starting June 2, it has begun rolling out new features for its TikTok competitor, Instagram Reels, to help creators engage with their audience better.

New features for Instagram Reels

With the new updated features, Instagram is increasing the duration of the Reels to 90 second from 60 seconds. This will give creators more time to interact with their audience, shoot behind-the-scene clips, or showcase any form of creativity they wish to in the extra 30 seconds.

Reels is also getting fresh sound effects like, air horns, crickets, drums, and more, to enable creators to add emotions to their Reels. Creators can now import their own audio to Reels as well. This will help them add commentary or background noise to any video that is at least 5 seconds long on the creator’s camera roll.

The social media platform is also adding interactive stickers to Reels that were already available for Instagram Stories. Creators can now add, Poll Stickers to get their audience’s opinion on different topics, Quiz Stickers to test their audience, and Emoji Slider to let their audience react to the Reels.

Instagram Reels is also said to get a new templates feature that will allow creators to make Reels using another one as a template with pre-loaded audio and clip placeholders. Users only have to add and trim their video recordings.

The social media platform also recently launched the Amber Alerts feature to help find missing children. The feature was developed in collaboration with organisations like, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in the US, the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children, the National Crime Agency in the UK, the Attorney General’s Office in Mexico, the Australian Federal Police, and others.