In a video posted to his Instagram and Twitter accounts back in June, Instagram head Adam Mosseri has stated that the company is now interested in becoming a more entertainment-focused app after the success of competing services such as TikTok and YouTube.
But let’s be honest for a second: Instagram just wants to be TikTok. YouTube has literally been around since the dawn of Web 2.0, and has been a cornerstone platform for social media sharing, content creation, and web blogging for millions of creators and viewers worldwide. Furthermore, YouTube was created in 2005, while Instagram wouldn’t come out until half a decade later, in 2010.
Mosseri has known about YouTube, and seen YouTube’s success for years well before Instagam was even a product. If there is any one metric you can rely on, just know that YouTube is the second largest search engine behind Google. It doesn’t even compare to conventional social media services, because conventional social media services can’t compare to YouTube.
The more likely scenario is that Adam Mosseri, as well as the other very-bright minds at Instagram, have taken stock of TikTok’s very rapid rise amongst Generation Z—and even some millennials. I am sure that amongst many of the team at Instagram, there might even be a belief that out of the currently available legacy platforms specialized in photo and video, Instagram is best positioned to take TikTok head-on.
Perhaps they are, and only time will tell. But if Facebook, Netflix, and Bitcoin all have something to say about how tech works on the internet, first movers’ advantages are a very powerful thing. What is interesting about Instagram, however, is that unlike Snapchat, the service actually does have some features that allow for it to stand out as a meaningful competitor. For instance, it does not have a follower requirement for releasing live videos, it has built-in store functionality for influencers, and finally, it is single-handedly the best application for taking photos and videos of equal quality on the internet.
I think what makes direct competition between Instagram and TikTok a toss-up, however, is that currently there is very little Instagram does that TikTok could not implement on its own after a few UI/UX sessions, and a couple of well-timed updates. This is to say that Instagram would effectively have to figure out how to differentiate itself from Tik Tok in ways that extend beyond simply making some technical updates, as well as some strategic changes about how it markets its product.
Fundamentally, Instagram would have to change what it is at a cultural level to achieve even so much as a semblance of TikTok’s success. When we unpack the situation, the reality is that TikTok and Instagram represent two very different things to two very different groups of people. On one hand, TikTok users are younger, and have a preference for in the moment content that is intended to be more authentic than it is intended to be polished. Instagram, on the other hand, is an app that is designed almost entirely around presenting polish. Just as much as it offers users the same tools to make perceptibly “authentic” content, Instagram has cultivated a culture for being a place where brands can effectively live—whether these are corporate brands, mom and pop brands, or even personal brands, Instagram is a brand-maker’s paradise.
The reality is that because Instagram is the older service, the greater challenge for them will not be producing a feature set, or marketing, that is reminiscent of what is seen on TikTok. Rather, their success will be predicated in part on their ability to transition the prevailing culture of the service to something that is more catered towards authenticity and individuals than brands. Of course, this can be a tough pill to swallow as it is essentially a problem with no clear solution, but at the same time, Instagram has to be careful with its future vision, as moving too far in the direction of TikTok could very well upend many of the small, and personal brands that have been vaulted to success.
In the end, only time will tell if Instagram’s strategic considerations are able to pan out into an efficacious, head-on, competition with TikTok. But I’ll say this much: the moment you are trying to compete with someone, by being more like them—there is a high likeliness that you have already lost your own competition. If Instagram is claiming that they want to be more like TikTok, but you don’t hear TikTok saying they want to be more like Instagram, then one must ask themselves if Instagram truly has what it takes to ever be perceived as the better social network. (info via The Verge)
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