“We are no longer a photo sharing app, or if you believe a square photo sharing app.” Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram since 2018, announces in a video Instagram’s turn to entertainment, “which is what users are looking for on the app, according to what polls say”. For this reason, explains Mosseri, the social network controlled by Facebook is studying new solutions to keep up with competitors like TikTok, who make (short) videos their core business.
“TikTok is huge and YouTube is even bigger” says Mosseri, who feels the need for a change: “In the coming months we will begin to experiment more with the recommended contents, showing things in your Feed that you may not have been following yet.”
“But we will also try to embrace the video trend more widely – adds Mosseri – with full-screen, immersive films, designed primarily for use on mobile”. The head of Instagram concludes his speech by referring again to “so many changes that will happen in the next six months or a year. It’s not something we will solve overnight”.
In short, Instagram openly chases TikTok, but this was already understood by the introduction of Reels, a function that allows you to create short videos – maximum 60 seconds – using effects that enrich or modify images.
The numbers show that Instagram, for now, has the better of TikTok, with about 1.2 billion active users every month against the 732 million of the Chinese app (Statista.com data). However, TikTok is growing rapidly: from the point of view of users, influencers and not least of the companies that choose the platform for their marketing campaigns. It will therefore be necessary to understand with which new tools and functions Instagram will conquer TikTok users, who with this app can already creatively create their videos and entertain themselves, in fact, with those of others.
edited by Pier Luigi Pisa