Attention Instagram fans. Adam Mosseri, who leads the Facebook-owned social media app, shared a video with his followers on Wednesday that basically amounted to a new Instagram update, albeit a high-level, advanced look at what’s to come. In short, the app you know and love is about to start trying radically different things. How to display recommended videos in full screen in user feeds. Even when the application duplicates existing functions that are complementary to its main functionality, such as shopping.
“We are no longer a photo-sharing app or a boxy photo-sharing app,” Mosseri says at one point in his video message. A consequence, of course, of the insurgent threat from rival apps like TikTok, shared clips that often flood users’ Instagram feeds. Consequently, Instagram plans to experiment “how we embrace video more broadly,” Mosseri said. “Full screen, immersive, entertaining video for mobile devices. He will see us doing a number of things or experimenting with various things in this space over the next few months.
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New Instagram update
If everything sounds a bit like the approach to everything but the kitchen sink that characterized Facebook’s growth, well, it should.
Facebook, of course, started out focused on status updates. From there, it turned into a voracious amoeba patch. Absorbing any new features that could and fitting them into the product, smooth fit or not. The Facebook hamburger menu on the side, for example, is still crammed with options and tabs that the average user never touches. However, Mosseri and the rest of the Instagram team want to include as many ancillary functions as they can on Instagram. To keep users hidden, of course. So they don’t go away and open something else, like the TikTok app.
“Let’s be honest,” Mosseri continued. “There is really serious competition right now. TikTok is huge, YouTube is even bigger, and there are so many other upstarts too. The time was that you used the app mainly to take a photo. You applied filters and shared the result with your friends. Now, Instagram wants a big bite of the same apple that Snapchat and TikTok, among others, are nibbling on.
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Creators, video, shopping and messaging
Take a look at Mosseri’s Instagram update above. For “normal” users, the 50% of those new categories that Instagram is most focused on right now don’t really apply to them. Most people are launching Short Stories, and perhaps experimenting with Reels, within the Instagram app. And possibly use IGTV to stream it live. And courier, sure, but who needs another courier in their life right now? Between iMessage, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, and the like, that area is pretty crowded. But sure, maybe more stickers and fun features will make Instagram Posts a more engaging place to hang out.
The cynic can see all this and feel that we are witnessing the same thing that happened to Facebook. Too much focus on competitive boxing, with dubious effect. Instagram, for example, launched Reels in August 2020 as a kind of TikTok knockoff. But, as we noted above, your own Instagram feed is probably still full of TikToks. So there isn’t much anecdotal slowdown, in other words.
More concerning, Piper Sandler’s Spring 2021 poll questioned teens about their favorite social media apps. Snapchat was the winner (with 31% of the votes), followed by TikTok with 30%. Instagram followed both, with 24%.
Instagram literally changed the design of their platform to make it easier to shop on their platform… which is why people don’t use the app as much anymore. It’s messy, cluttered, and difficult to navigate… not to mention, the algorithm is rubbish.
– Yazmin (YAZs-MEEn) (@_TheBeautyBruja) May 13, 2021
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