Want to share a link on Instagram? You could always stick the URL in a caption but it is not clickable. The alternative is to share it in an Instagram Story, but even then it is not available to all users as it would require users to either be verified or have at least 10,000 followers. Presumably this is to prevent people from creating and sharing malicious links.
However, Instagram is slowly opening up the feature to more users. The company has told The Verge that they are not testing allowing more users to put links in their Stories, but not in the current form. Instead, the alternative method would involve putting a sticker in Stories that users can tap to open the link.
According to Instagram’s head of product Vishal Shah, this is a glimpse at the future of what the company has planned for its platform. “That is the sort of future system we would like to get to. And that’s what we hope to roll out, if we’re able to make this work.” At the moment since this is a test, not everyone can use it.
It also still seems to be semi-exclusive to people who have a larger reach instead of regular Instagram users, so whether or not you’ll be included in the test will vary from user to user.