Instagram proclaims 60 second tales and will flip right into a TikTookay copycat

Instagram became a kind of wildcard for Facebook. (Oops, Meta; sorry, Zuckerberg!) The company could now consider the service a TikTok killer. It is nothing new. Instagram has been the “killer” of Snapchat and YouTube in the past. Snapchat was very hurt. But YouTube is stronger than ever – until today.

Now Facebook (sorry, Meta!) Is giving signals that it will soon be giving up one of its most famous “inspired” tools: Stories. That was an idea that Snapchat only came up with in the middle of the last decade, and Zuckerberg’s company decided to include it in all of its services without paying any rights to the other organization.

As of 2016, like Snapchat, you can post 15 second videos that disappear after 24 hours. Now the company has confirmed that it is be able to post 60-second videos on Stories soon– just like Reels, another “inspired” Instagram feature (now from TikTok).

The news comes in the same quarter as Instagram decided Close IGTV. Of course, the company it aims to do is traditional “Revolution” with its Metaverse wasn’t that original in this case. Posting long videos looks a lot like YouTube, right?

A curiosity: before Acquired Instagram for $ 1 billion in 2012, the company was already a giant and started developing a mobile app that would allow users to post photos with filters.

Does it remind you of something

Yes sir. In the event that the Instagram acquisition fails, Facebook already had a “killer” for the actual “killer” of everything that disturbs Zuckerberg’s company. It was Facebook camera– launched a month after the Instagram takeover – and something almost no one remembers today.

This aggressive strategy has turned the service where we once saw food porn and puppy pictures with hipster filters into something more like a Frankenstein. Not in those words, of course, but that’s something even the company agrees with.

“We placed a lot of new bets [in the app]“, Said Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, to The edge at the beginning of the year. According to him, “most people” don’t know the difference between videos posted on Instagram and IGTV, for example. “We need to get back to our focus on simplicity and craft.”

Back to simplicity

Until recently, there were only four ways to post to Instagram for videos: Feed, Stories, IGTV, and Reels. They were all “inspired” by some of their competitors. The photos, which were the heart of the social app from the start, are still there, but no longer as important to the company as they used to be.

Mosseri declared in June that the service is “no longer a photo sharing app” when it comes to explaining video plans: “Let’s be honest, there is really serious competition right now. TikTok is huge, YouTube is even bigger, and there are plenty of other upstart too. People look to Instagram to be entertained, there is fierce competition, there is more to be done and that is something we have to embrace. “

That will radically change Instagram, say specialists in outlets such as Social media today. Closing IGTV was the first step. Now let’s turn to the stories that are very similar to the roles. Mosseri has already said that that doesn’t make him “happy”. Now stories can only have one purpose: to bring them together to provide a simple tool for full-screen video and an almost infinite feed of entertainment content to scroll through. Like what TikTok of course!

Instagram has changed a lot. For example, his logo was initially a Polaroid photo camera. But when the product boss says the app’s once primary function (photos) is no longer important and talks specifically about TikTok (we already know they failed trying to compete with YouTube) what do you expect what will happen will?

Why TikTok?

Facebook was founded in 2004, less than a year before YouTube. But at the time, Facebook was mostly for college students. MySpace was the largest social network. And YouTube became world famous before Facebook.

When Mark Zuckerberg had the strength to fight big corporations, he looked for other social media services like MySpace and Snapchat, not YouTube. YouTube was taken over by another giant, Google, and its strategy was to maintain its hegemony in video.

Lately, Facebook has been trying to compete with YouTube. In 2018, it launched IGTV, an Instagram long video tool, and said it did “The future for videos.” Facebook failed and I gave up on it last October, and the company was no closer to a threat to YouTube.

But since Facebook has surpassed MySpace in the number of users In 2009, no other social service got as close to the public of its Facebook and Instagram brands as TikTok. Don’t think of Twitter – from which Facebook got “inspiration” for its timeline, or LinkedIn, which copied the Facebook feed. These two social services are still niche.

TikTok is going to be huge, really huge. And fast. The Chinese app did it 1 billion users in September. It’s very close to Instagram which today has 1.4 billion users. Facebook is still the largest social platform in the world, with almost 3 billion users.

What makes TikTok even more impressive is the speed of growth. As we can see in the graphic below, it took almost nine years for Facebook to reach 1 billion users; for Instagram almost eight years; for TikTok only five years.

There are several other problems. Facebook has faced polemics for about two months since the company’s internal documents were released showing its executives that their services are causing mental health problems, democracies, and even wars.

Instagram will testify beforehand the US Senate next month after that The Wall Street Journal published an internal study that shows that one in three girls thinks Instagram makes body image problems worse, and that the social app causes anxiety and depression.

The company knew of these problems and apparently did little to help its users, thinking more about profits than the public good. Because of this, fewer and fewer people trust the company, Research shows. Facebook was the least trustworthy social company in previous research. And after that that number went down even further.

In addition, Facebook services are facing a decline in usage by young people. Today, 63% of Americans between the ages of 12 and 17 use TikTok. According to information, only 57% of them use Instagram Forrester’s research.

Why is that a problem? Historically, young people are responsible for trends and are more concerned with social media. When they’re not there, people of different ages may be looking for other options that are cooler and trending. To stop this from happening, Instagram is trying to transform itself into TikTok.

What should marketers do?

First, let’s talk about videos. If you still think that video is the future of the internet, please change your mind. Video is not the future; it is the present! According to Cisco, Video will account for 82% of Internet traffic over the next year. So, if you haven’t started investing in it yet, you are too late.

Do you need to be on TikTok? Be careful here. Before you make up your mind, you need to look at your brand personality. Is your audience there? Don’t blindly follow trends. It’s not just TikTok that is growing. YouTube continues to be huge. But you have other options. Spotify is growing strongly with podcasts, for example. Do you have to be there again? Ask your audience. They have to be where they are!

Should you worry if you are very dependent on Instagram? The answer is yes. First, the social media app is changing its core to include young people. Perhaps your audience who love vintage photos on the feed are looking for a different place like Pinterest – what continues to grow as a niche service and today has more users than Twitter.

Here’s another thing. Instagram has been successful in the past at slowing Snapchat down by copying it. But the same didn’t work with YouTube. Yes, the company has a lot of money. But MySpace, that at the height of its popularity at News Corp. soldHe was also outdone by Facebook.

We had another similar worldwide case. The top countries for using social media are the United States, India, and Brazil. In 2004, Google launched a social media service called Orkut, which only included Brazil and India. It was huge in these two countries, with almost 80% of internet users use it. But six years later Orkut started to decline and Facebook has topped it.

Why? Nobody wants to stay where you can’t interact with your friends. When young people start using another service, other age groups will soon discover it too. Then, when a lot of people start to accept it, their friends start to change too. So we have a massive migration.

Is it going to happen to Instagram? I can help you with some historical data, but I cannot predict the future. Like Instagram did with Snapchat, it has a chance of doing well against TikTok. But TikTok is much bigger today than Snapchat was ever before. So I can tell you that if you are heavily dependent on Instagram, it is risky to continue this strategy.

Maybe Instagram will succeed now. Who will guarantee that in the future? It’s really important to diversify your branding and acquisition channels. I’m not just talking about social media.

Look for other social channels but guarantee, for example, a great experience on your website and blog. It’s also important to have your own contact list of people interested in what you’re selling. Then you can email them anytime you want without relying on third-party environments.

Don’t just trust one tactic or source for traffic and acquisition. Your company is safe with a diverse strategy!

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