How To Check Instagram DM Online? (PC & MAC)

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About Instagram

instagram dm online

It is a photo, videos sharing social networking service. With lots of features in it, the most loved one to keep in contact with our friend is Instagram direct messaging. It lets users to interact through private messaging. (who follow each other). It is a very interactive feature letting us to send messages along with photos and videos.The feature limits spam messages by marking messages as message requests if you receive it from a profile you do not follow. The Instagram direct also has a featured camera in it giving you the luxury to send a picture or a video without interrupting the conversation. With an update,it then allowed to add website links in the conversation.

Must Read : How To Get Free Instagram Followers?

So,Instagram is daily updating and upgrading its social networking service to make it user-friendly. The recent feature added to the existing Instagram messaging is ‘to check whether your friend is online’. This makes Instagram chats easier as you can see the current availability of the person. If your friend is online, your Instagram dm inbox (direct message) will itself reflect a green dot alongside the person’s chat with you. But what if you’ve never direct messaged the person before.

But before that let’s take a look at all available features of the app which is added to keep itself at the top of the marketing game.

  • The inclusion of characters like #, @ in the bio.This feature helps the audience to reach to other Instagram profile. This helped a lot of Instagram based bloggers to keep their professional and private accounts separate.
  • The‘TYPE ‘mode. The new feature added this year in February; the feature helped to add a new look to our typed stories.
  • The GIF’s. The Instagram teamed up with GIPHY to add highly quality GIF’s to Instagram stories. These expressive GIFs make stories more personalized and fun!
  • The‘MENTION’ sticker. The mention sticker has made the use ‘@’oblivion. The sticker can be directly used to mention a person to our story also with a touch of highlight.
  • Re-sharing posts to stories. The posts that come up on our feed can now be shared with our audience by sharing them on our stories with this added feature. Just tap the share icon beneath post and the option will be available.
  • The emoji slider poll. This feature is like an upgrade to a previous poll sticker. Slide the emoji to answer the poll.
  • The‘ask me anything ‘sticker. Recently introduced and probably the most trending feature of the site. This feature allows the user to ask questions to its followers on their stories, while they can answer by tapping on it.
  • The ‘IGTV’. This feature on the app brought service to a whole new level. The igtv or the Instagram tv basically allows the user to create a channel to upload a video with a time boundation of up to 10 minutes. While notable people on the app are allowed to upload video up to 60 minutes.  This feature is giving a tough competition to YouTube as the beauty, dance, music bloggers, a re-switching to IGTV to upload short videos.
  • The‘highlights’ feature. Are you one of those who does not like to post much but like to keep your stories for eternity? Well here is a feature which will just fulfill your wish. The highlight feature helps you to keep your stories visible on your Instagram profile. They can be revisited by your audience anytime.

Existing features of Instagram dm Online

  1. The private messaging has existing features like ‘disappearing’ photos and videos. The feature allows the sender to disappear the message once viewed by the recipient. The update of this gives three options viz. allow replay, one view and, keep in chat.
  2. The sender gets a notification in the updated app if the recipient has taken a screenshot, or has replayed. Such updates keep transparency among the users which is very helpful.

Let us now focus on its one of the major newest feature- ‘Instagram dm online’ which took Instagram to a whole new level of competition with WhatsApp, Facebook and other social media platforms.

The feature allows you to keep a tap of your friends as when they were online also called as activity status. This feature’s addition made clear that the app is now not only just photo sharing platform, making engagement with people as important. Baring us from the FOMO feeling, the app is helping us to connect to distant friends.Take a look below on how to keep a check on the activities of our friends.

Ways to check if the user is online

1. There is a ‘+’ sign in your Instagram inbox, tapping that sign search for the person you want to DM Instagram Online. A green dot will reflect in your search result in beside the person.

2. The Instagram also features activity status for the same. If the person isnot online, the chat box will show its activity status. For example active 42 min ago or active 4d (days) ago. This is also helpful to check the user’s frequency on Instagram.

Also Check : View Private Instagram Photos

3. You can check their stories. If the user has uploaded a story the activity status will reflect on the top left corner of the story. Example: 3h, 42m,3m and, likewise. Or else search the person in your explore tab/ search bar and check their stories on their profile.

4. While sharing a post or a story a menu popups. Showing list of people, you are following in priority, while you can also search the people. The green dot reflects their also beneath their profile circles.

Limitations

While this online Instagram dm feature is vastly helpful, it comes with its own limitations. You cannot see the online availability of the user if their account is private, or if you do not follow them.

Though this feature is helpful what was the need to add this feature in the first place?

Instagram direct message (dm) online is altogether a new and better feature to make real-time conversations.It makes us happy to see who are currently available so about to conversate or share posts with. Instead of mindlessly liking posts in our feed, the feature might push us to make some real-time conversations with ourloved ones and catch up. This seamless experience has been boon to many who like to keep an update with their friends like to conversate on the basis of current availability instead of relying on laters.

While some of you might have liked the feature there are people who like to keep things private. For all you who do not like sharing their activity status the good news is that you can easily hide it! Acting similarly in WhatsApp pattern hiding your activity status will not allow you to see theirs. Which is we think is fair enough.

How to hide your activity status (in easy steps)

1. Open your Instagram profile on your device. Tap the triple bar symbol in the top right corner of your profile

2. A menu will display. The end of the column will show Instagram settings options, tap that.

3. Scrolling down under privacy and security option tap on activity status.

4. Toggle off the show activity status. Thus your activity status will conceal.

Both of these features come in hand in hand. This is because this feature is not boon for many people, such as accounts of celebrities on social media. Although this a medium for them to connect to their fans, some people misuse it. Celebrities usually keep their activity status hidden so as to limit the spam messages. Or probably keep those ghost users and stalkers at bay from their private lives. Similarly, many other people like to keep things private by using this feature.

Although this feature is useful yet there is a loophole in it. The stories uploaded always reflect the time at which they were uploaded as mentioned above in the article.

The criticism

With the addition of this feature,it got mixed reactions from the users. While some were in favour of this feature. They explained how difficult is to keep real-time conversations with people in different time zones. The Instagram online direct messaging has allowed keeping track of their online activity reducing distance among the users. The feature has also received harsh criticism from the people who did not like this addition. Numerous reasons have been given for it. Some find it as an annoyance to let followers get a sign that they are available to chat while others altogether did not like letting people know their engagement time in the app. the other notion can be that we already spend a lot of time on social media this feature might encourage users more messaging.

With this added feature we can say Instagram is making huge efforts to give its users more personalized experience. The change of API (application programming interface) itself was a huge move by the app. We can say that every week we probably see a new Instagram. Giving tough competition to other social media apps, Instagram is currently at the top of its game, and its users love it.