This Changes Everything!

TIKTOK IS TAKING ITS TOLL ON INSTAGRAM

Instagram is playing defence for the first time in its history, and that's showing up in some major changes that they're rolling out this week.

TikTok has taken a serious chunk out of IG’s marketshare, and the folks at Meta HQ do not have a history of playing nicely with competitors. A few years back, when that competitor was Snapchat, Instagram moved quickly to rip off their Stories format so they never really faced any serious threat of being dethroned.

Predictably, this time around they’re doing what’s always worked in the past: Incorporating competitors' features that people seem to be loving into their own user experience. Leveraging their superior resources and network effect makes it easier for users to adopt the new feature that they love within the platform that they’re already familiar with.

This time things are a bit different. TikTok has more users, more momentum, and perhaps most importantly, more of our attention than any other Meta-competitor ever has, and that’s a major problem for Instagram. That’s why IG is not just adding several new features, they’re fundamentally reimagining the user experience, and the initial feedback has not been positive. The changes are currently in the roll-out/testing phase, so if you haven’t seen them yet, these are the two most important features that are about change the way that we all use Instagram:

FEATURE 1: FULL-SCREEN MAIN FEED

Gone are the days of silently scrolling through a sea of static images. Instagram now commands your full screen and your full attention with a Feed that features borderless content and a significant bias towards video. The Feed is meant to mimic the content discovery experience that has made TikTok so successful, but some early users report that it feels like Instagram is shouting at them. Here's one person's take on the new experience:

FEATURE 2: CREATOR SUBSCRIPTIONS

In a video posted to his own account on July 14th, head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, said “We want Instagram to be the best place online for creators to make a living.”

To achieve that, they’re rolling out an expanded subscription feature where users can pay their favourite creators for access to exclusive content, ranging from Reels to Stories to Group Chats and Live Video. Clearly, Instagram understands that its creators are its lifeblood. If the people who make the stuff that we all love to see were to jump to other channels, then of course they would take at least some of their audience’s attention along with them.

The battle lines have been drawn, and Instagram is bringing out every tactic it has to defend its standing as a platform for creators, because if it doesn’t, then nothing else really matters.

SO WHAT?

Every time any social platform makes an update, people shout their grievances from the rooftops. Is this just another one of those?

The environment has changed, and so has the impact of these changes. Regardless of how annoyed we were in the past, the feature updates were redecorations or additions to a house that we all gathered in. This time we have options – our attention is distributed in a variety of ways to a handful of places, and Instagram is doing its best to become the coolest place on the block again; However, even if they do succeed, they will have lost any control they once had over their user experience, and will exist in a perpetual defence mode against TikTok’s next move, because it’s not going anywhere.

For those of us who are stuck in the middle, ie. brands and content creators, the answer is simple: More video content.

With the largest platforms in the world battling for attention, and each of them attempting to serve up ever-increasing amounts of attention-keeping videos, beautiful photos just aren’t going to cut through.

So if you have been holding out, hesitant to embrace Instagram Reels, TikTok video, and the other creative formats that they’re jamming to the front whether we like it or not, now is the time to take advantage, because if you can give people a reason to stay on their app for just 5 seconds longer, any of the major platforms will suddenly become your most powerful business partner.

Written by Conner Galway, Junction Consulting