Facebook begins testing feature to invite friends on Instagram live videos

Instagram has began testing a new feature that lets users invite a friend to participate in the live with a few select people. **Facebook** eventually plans to roll out the feature to everyone on Facebook. A button on the bottom right corner allows users to invite a friend on **Instagram** . The screen splits into two, and the invited user shows up below the feed of the user who started the live. Followers will be able to comment as usual. [caption id=“attachment_3909539” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Inviting a guest on Instagram Live[/caption] Once invited, a user can remove the invited user at any point of time, or the invited user can leave on their own accord. Once the live is finished, the live can be deleted from the stream, or shared to Stories, like the regular Instagram live videos. Instagram introduced **live videos in November 2016** , with a disappearing function to add more **Snapchat** -like features to the image-oriented social network. The feature has been used by “millions of users” according to Facebook. In May this year, the ability to invite guests to Facebook live videos was rolled out to all users. The feature allows live broadcasters on Facebook to **invite one of their viewers** to participate in the stream. In Facebook though, the feature is available in both portrait and landscape modes, but on Instagram, the feature is only available in the portrait mode. Recently, Instagram Stories **completed a year** and the numbers released were impressive vis-a-vis Snapchat. In terms of average time spent on Instagram, it is 32 minutes per day for users below the age of 25. And for those over 25 years, the duration is 24 minutes per day. According to the Instagram  blog, half the business accounts have posted an Instagram story in the last month. And one in every five business stories posted gets a Direct Message. By all measures, these are impressive numbers for a feature that just turned one. Instagram Stories has over 250 million active daily users as compared to Snapchat’s 166 million.