The Icons Under an Instagram Post, Explained (Including the Repost Arrows)

The row under an Instagram post has five icons now, and most guides still describe four. The fifth, a pair of arrows, arrived in 2025 and confused a lot of people who thought it was a second share button. It isn't, and the difference matters if you post your own content.

Here's each icon, what tapping it does, and what it means when other people tap it on your post.

The Row, Left to Right

♡ Heart — Like Tap once to like, tap again to remove. Double-tapping the photo does the same. Likes are the cheapest action on the platform, and Instagram treats them that way. They count, but a post with 200 likes and no saves will travel less far than a post with 80 likes and 30 saves.

💬 Speech bubble — Comment Opens the comments. Instagram reads comments as a stronger signal than likes, and it reads replies to comments as a signal that the post started a conversation, which is stronger still. This is why replying to your own comments in the first hour does more than posting a second time.

✈ Paper plane — Share Opens the share sheet: send to a person or group in DMs, add to your Story, copy link, or share to another app. Shares to Stories put your post in front of someone else's entire audience, and DM shares are the private version of a recommendation. Both are weighted heavily. In your Insights, shares of all kinds roll up into one "Shares" number.

⇄ Two arrows — Repost The new one. Tapping it reposts the post to your profile under a Reposts tab, and it can appear in your followers' feeds with the original author credited. Unlike a Story share, it doesn't expire. Unlike the old screenshot-and-repost habit, it keeps attribution intact. If you're on the receiving end, reposts show up in your Insights as their own count. The etiquette and strategy of reposting changed a lot when this shipped; in short, it's now the cleanest way to amplify someone else's post.

🔖 Bookmark — Save Saves the post to your private Saved area, optionally into a named collection. Nobody sees what you save. For creators, saves are the metric that most reliably predicts extended reach, because they're the clearest signal that content was useful rather than just pleasant. Making posts people save is a strategy in its own right.

The Icons Around the Row

A few more glyphs live near the post rather than under it:

• ⋯ Three dots (top right) — the more menu: Not Interested, Report, Hide, Copy link, Share to, Add to favorites, Unfollow, and About this account.
• Small person silhouette (bottom left of the image) — tap to reveal tagged accounts.
• Shopping bag — the post has tagged products.
• Two overlapping avatars in the header — a Collab post with two authors; likes and comments are shared between both profiles.
• Dots or a "1/5" counter — a carousel. Swipe for more slides.
• ♪ Audio label at the bottom — the track used on a Reel or a photo post. Tapping it opens the audio page and every post using it.
• Sparkle "AI info" label — Meta detected or was told that the content was made or edited with AI.

If you want the full inventory beyond the post itself, the complete icon reference covers Stories, DMs, Insights, and profile badges too.

Which Taps Move the Needle

Ranked by how much weight Instagram gives them when deciding whether to show a post to more people, from what creators can observe in their own Insights:

1. Shares (Stories and DMs) — the post is leaving your audience and entering someone else's.
2. Saves — the post was useful enough to keep.
3. Reposts — the newest signal and still settling, but it behaves like a share with a longer shelf life.
4. Comments, especially replies and comments longer than a few words.
5. Likes — the baseline. Necessary, not sufficient.

The practical consequence: a post built to be liked (pretty, agreeable, low-stakes) and a post built to be saved (specific, useful, referenceable) look similar in the feed and travel completely differently. Design for the icons on the right side of the row, and the ones on the left take care of themselves.