Instagram plugs its camera with new features (FB, SNAP)

Face filters have arrived in the Instagram camera, enabling users to overlay their selfies and regular shots with Snapchat-like animations.

This is an overt move by Instagram to get people to take photos and videos in its platform, and, as always, these recordings can then be sent to friends via Instagram Direct or added to a story.

The Facebook-owned app has also rolled out new “creative tools” — a phrase that comes straight from Snapchat’s playbook — to its stories platform, including a Rewind feature to play videos in reverse, custom hashtag stickers that users can tap to explore related posts, and an eraser brush to go alongside Instagram’s existing drawing tools. These features are less about coaxing people to use Instagram's camera than increasing engagement more generally.

These features all have Snapchat in their crosshairs, and aim to increase Instagram engagement in the following ways:

Mobile-app makers and content creators are vying for consumer attention in a crowded and noisy market.

Even if an app can stand out enough to prompt a consumer to download it from among a list of millions, it then faces the challenge of enticing him or her to use it enough times to recuperate development, maintenance, and marketing costs. To make matters worse, those marketing costs have hit record-high levels over the past year as discoverability has become more challenging.

And while consumers are spending more time in apps, most of that time is spent in a few favorites. Consumers spend almost three-quarters of their total smartphone app time in just their three favorite apps, according to comScore.

But it's not all doom and gloom: There are numerous tools at a publisher's disposal to engage and re-engage consumers, and there are new products and solutions coming to market that can help alleviate some of the issues around this app engagement crisis.

Jessica Smith, research analyst for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on app engagement that explores the current state of the app market, the issues around engaging consumers, and the tools at a publisher's disposal. It also identifies best practices for the implementation of some app engagement tools, and presents the pitfalls that some publishers fall into in this pursuit.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

In full, the report:

Interested in getting the full report? Here are two ways to access it:

Instagram plugs its camera with new features (FB, SNAP)

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