Hey, Facebook: you spilled some Snapchat in our Instagram
In a bold and surprising move, Instagram announced yesterday that they were launching “Instagram Stories,” a near clone (both functionally and nominally) of Snapchat’s “Stories” feature. When asked about the similarity in a recent interview, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom replied that, “this isn’t about who invented something. This is about a format, and how you take it to a network and put your own spin on it.”
Systrom makes a great point, particularly when you look at the way social media has evolved over the years. Facebook was initially labeled a “rip off” of similar platforms like Friendster and MySpace. Even recently, Twitter and Instagram have both adopted Facebook’s algorithmic content feed format.
It is of interest to note that Facebook did at one point try to acquire Snapchat for $3 billion, three times what they ended up paying for Instagram. Snapchat of course declined the offer, which turned out to be a wise decision; the company is now valued at approximately $20 billion.
While Instagram’s new offering doesn’t include everything we love about Snapchat, such as face-swapping and filters, we’re more excited about what Instagram’s version offers that Snapchat can’t. The greatest strengths of Instagram are its network and its platform. The accounts users follow on Instagram are much more likely to be of deeper relevance to them, as they were imported from another social network or discovered organically as opposed to just being a phonebook contact as you have with Snapchat.
We anticipate that this will lead to the emergence of a new behavior pattern, one that falls somewhere in between that of the average Instagram and Snapchat user. Snapchatters tend to be quick and messy with their content, particularly since there is no real concern about permanence. Photos and videos are typically only viewable for about 10 seconds, and are permanently deleted after 24 hours. Because of this, Snaps often tend to be a bit goofier and more raw. Instagram, on the other hand, has become a sort of living album; a chronicle of users’ actual lives. Instagrammers, therefore, tend to be much more deliberate about crafting the perfect shot: finding just the right lighting and angles, striking the right pose, applying the right filter, etc.
In fact, the pressure to garner “likes” on Instagram posts has led to an intriguing phenomenon: an internal Instagram study recently reported that many teens delete half of all their photos on average, eliminating any trace of content that could be judged as sub-par. With the introduction of this new “Stories” functionality, we anticipate Instagram users to begin exhibiting behavior that combines these two polar ideologies, and it may just be the sweet spot for the larger audience on the whole.
We’re also excited for the potential that this development has toward legitimizing and normalizing Snapchat as a marketing tool. The platform has often been marginalized as nothing more than a way for people to send each other inappropriate photos, though we as marketers know better. By showing brands that are already utilizing Instagram as a part of their social media strategies that the “disappearing content” model can be used effectively, we expect to see quite a few more of these brands warming up to the possibility of rolling Snapchat into their strategies as well.
