Instagram's new maneuvers to maintain its reign – La Tercera


Meta's app's power has been called into question after TikTok's meteoric rise. It challenged the Chinese company by imitating its short-video model, albeit without much success. It's now testing the option of group profiles to differentiate itself by creating a community. What does its future hold? Two experts offer clues.
Meta's last year has been marked by constant changes and challenges. Mark Zuckerberg's company has made superhuman efforts to stay at the forefront of technology and social media. and thus safeguard the hegemony it has held for over a decade thanks to Facebook and Instagram, which also includes WhatsApp and Messenger. Among these is the creation of the multiverse, but also new features.
On WhatsApp, for example, “Communities” was launched, a feature that allows group administrators to better organize conversations., allowing users to share larger files, make voice calls with up to 32 people, and even conduct surveys. And currently, Instagram is testing the option to create group profiles where each member can post and upload stories, aiming to bring the concept of community to the social network as well.
Today, Instagram's big struggle is to keep users on the app. One of them is the new tool which will be released for content creators to make their own NFTs and can sell them on and off Instagram, facilitating the process from creation to display for sale. This complements the subscription feature, which has been gradually rolled out since July and encourages exclusive chats, posts, and reels for subscribers.
Not only that, because the North American company is introducing gifts in Instagram reels and thus encouraging users to buy "stars" in the application and can give them to the creators through the reels they upload.
These actions are not random: many content creators have favored TikTok, which has had an impact on Meta's figures, so incentivizing them is a crucial task for Meta and Instagram.
It's no secret that TikTok has become the app of the moment at a dizzying pace. Its endless list of content has been one of the pillars of the Chinese application that has achieved More than 3.5 billion downloads since its launch in 2016.
For this reason, a battle has been brewing for the past two years between the giant founded by Zuckerberg and the company ByteDance. So much so that in August 2020, Instagram launched Reels, a format that allows users to create short, vertical videos with music, effects, and editing. That is, the same way TikTok rose smoothly. It's not a new technique: in 2016, it launched Instagram Stories, the same photo and video uploading feature that Snapchat offered.
But while Zuckerberg's company emerged victorious from that fight, the situation now looks much more complex.
Last July, Tati Bruening, an American photographer and influencer, started a campaign posting an image with a request: “Let Instagram be Instagram again. Stop trying to be TikTok, I just want to see pretty pictures of my friends. Sincerely, everyone.” The post was filled with reactions, and celebrities Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner shared the message on their accounts. This is no small feat: they have 332 million and 372 million followers, respectively. In fact, their influence is such that when they criticized a Snapchat redesign in 2018, the company lost $1.3 billion in a week.
So much was the stir now that the director of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, had to step forward and explain the changes that were coming to the app, In addition to emphasizing that the photos will remain on the platform, but that over time it will be based more on videos"We're going to continue supporting images; it's part of our heritage. But I'll be honest, I think Instagram will host more and more videos over time, although we won't change anything and will maintain the chronological order," the executive said.
Where is Instagram in this scenario? It's a very adverse one. Although the company founded in 2010 has tried to transform its spirit, it hasn't managed to match TikTok's audience numbers. According to Meta, Instagram has surpassed 2 billion active users, while its rival has claimed to have 1.6 billion monthly users..
However, in the face-to-face comparison between TikTok videos and Instagram Reels, there is a huge difference. The Wall Street Journal published studies internal reports from the North American company that revealed the gap between the two applications. It details that the Instagram users spend 17.6 million hours a day watching Reels, while TikTok users spend 197.8 million hours.
It wasn't the only statistical problem: the “Creators x Reels State of the Union 2022” document, published internally in August, indicates that engagement of Reels had fallen by 13.6% in the last month and that most users had no type of engagement.
Devi Narasimhan, a Meta representative, stated that users were outdated and didn't respond to a global reach. On the other hand, they insisted that this format accounts for 201P3T of the time people spend on the app, and that the amount of time users were spending on video formats had increased.
There are various arguments that TikTok is better than Instagram.
Sebastian Saavedra, commercial manager of the DRY agency, breaks some down.”The first reason is due to the naturalness of the content and the freedom that users have to upload whatever they want.", explains the expert.
And it continues: “The second is due to its algorithm and the "For You" feature, which allows users to access content tailored to their tastes from the very beginning, becoming a powerful content curator of what the user really likes to see, omitting the vision of a few years ago that it was a network for singing or dancing. Today you find tutorials on the blades a lawnmower should use or on financial education." The big difference, he says, is that in the other applications "the user must have been using it for a certain amount of time for the algorithm to recommend content based on their own tastes."
Nicolás Silva, Technology Director of Asimov Consultants, states that “TikTok is a social network dedicated strictly to sharing videos, there are no photos or stories like on Instagram. Therefore, If I spend the same amount of time using both apps, I'm more likely to watch videos on TikTok than on Reels, since I'll be competing with less content within the same platform.. Plus, it's much simpler to use for video sharing. It's simpler than Instagram."
There is more data that confirms the advantage that the ByteDance application has over Meta: according to the Center for Meta TransparencyTikTok.com is the number one most-viewed website with 35.9 million views in the first quarter, while it ranks fourth among most-visited domains (first is YouTube.com).
On the other hand, the same publication of The Wall Street Journal addresses the problem that the North American application has had in getting content creators to bet on the platform: in the United States, only 20.7% of the nearly 11 million content creators publish there. “According to data from We Are Social 2022, in Chile, TikTok has 11 million active users; Instagram has 8.6 million. Successful content is likely to repeat its success on Instagram,” says Saavedra.
In fact, the “Creators x Reels State of the Union 2022” document indicates that Nearly a third of Reels videos were created on another platform, usually TikTok.Nicolás Silva points out that by focusing on videos, it makes it simpler and has better-tuned algorithms, unlike Instagram, whose core focus is photo sharing. “Although new video-sharing features have been added over time, they don't have the simplicity of TikTok, as it's not a fully dedicated tool. Having more features at the same time makes it more complex,” he points out.
As if that were not enough, a study by Social Insider, which analyzed 616,409 TikTok videos from 3,127 profiles between August 2021 and August 2022, found that The average engagement rate per view was 6,72%, while the average view rate reached 16,23%. On the opposite sidewalk, the engagement Instagram was strongly affected, as its best figure was in the travel category content, with 1,15%.
Sebastián Saavedra, manager of the DRY agency, argues that this is because the Chinese app “has an algorithm that captivates, and can have users consuming content for hours without realizing it, unlike Instagram where the content is more formal.” However, he points out that lives Instagram's popularity remains quite strong among audiences over 30. "I'd venture to say that Facebook hasn't lost market penetration in regions and segments over 40, especially with the proper use of Meta Ads Manager, when brands want to boost their content and generate traffic to their websites."
Who will take the crown? At least in the numbers. TikTok maintains the lead: According to app analytics firm Apptopia, ByteDance's app had 317 million downloads during the first half of 2022, versus 280 million for Instagram..
For Saavedra, Meta has no chance against its rival. “TikTok continues its rise, with more than 201% of internet users over the age of 18 globally. In fact, we are suggesting that all the companies we work with at the agency create content on TikTok and begin advertising paid content,” he says.
Silva, of Asimov Consultores, is more measured, emphasizing that it's difficult to predict which app will prevail. "In the past, we've had multiple social networks and/or messaging systems that we thought would never relinquish their dominance, such as ICQ, MSN, Facebook, etc. But we see that trends change, and it's possible that from one year to the next a very famous social network could be completely forgotten," he argues.
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Cristian Valenzuela of BCS Estudios; Maureen Berho of Nimble Games Entertainment; and Alexander Hass, president of Video Games Chile, analyze the current state of the sector, what's needed to strengthen it, and offer advice to those who want to make this area a business venture.
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