In august, Instagram released its Stories feature, allowing its users to take, edit and post photos or videos that disappear in 24 hours. This caused a wide spread debate considering the fact that Instagram didn’t hide Stories was copied from Snapchat. In fact, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom even admitted that the Stories where a direct imitation by saying that Snapchat deserves all the credit.
However, next to the obvious similarities, the image massaging platforms also have a lot of differences. Instagram’s Stories for instance have a much wider reach. Where Snapchat is the ‘new guy’, Instagram has double the users as Snapchat, users who come to life because of these Stories. Because you already have your followers on Instagram, it’s easier to get your Stories to a larger crowd. As an example, Nike generated 800.000 views in 24 hours for an Instagram Story, posted on the first day the feature was available. The most popular post of Nike on Snapchat got only 66.000 views.
Where Stories is better at some areas, Snapchat beats it at others. Snapchat is, apart from the basic Instagram Stories drawings and colour filters, big on its geofilters, face-mapping filters and motion filters. Snapchat also has a much better approach for advertising. Where Instagram doesn’t have any non-aggressive space for companies to advertise trough Stories, Snapchat created a whole separate page with plenty of space for companies to advertise.
Joining the game
WhatsApp also noticed that the photo editing feature in social media is getting more and more important. Therefor they released a function that allows users to draw on their photos and videos. They also added the option to put stickers on top of your photo, again just like snapchat. However this could possibly be a distraction for a bigger issue, since WhatsApp received a lot of criticism when it changed its privacy policy in order to share user’s phone numbers and data with Facebook.
Who do you think is going to win the game?
Interesting question. I would like to refer to a famous Dutch proverb: “Better well stolen than badly invented.” Instagram did a great job on copying Snapchat functionality and it is a great addition to their current service. So in that way, I regard Instagram as the winner in this situation.
However, I believe Instagram can coexist. I think they serve different kinds of messages. Snapchat is more a platform to message your friends, where Instagram can be seen as a personal branding platform. I think Snapchat is going to be the platform on which you message your friends, whereas Instagram is going to be the platform where you can follow influencers.
Very interesting topic. I wonder what would happen with the competitivity of both companies. Like you said, Snapchat is better at most features of the ‘Stories’. But I think due to the many more users on Instagram, they will gain the most popularity for the feature. Until Snapchat will get more users, I don’t think that they will win the battle of popularity on this feature. I wonder what your opinion is on this topic?
This is very interesting.. I think that Instagram did stolen the idea from snapchat. Snapchat is an very nice application and many people are using it. I think it is nice to see what all your friends are doing during the day. But nowadays all the social media applications do steal things from each other. For example on facebook you have the option to chat with everybody just like you can do on Whatsapp. So because of that my opinion is also that Instagram is the winner here. Instagram is big with a lot of users worldwide so with Instagram you can reach a very wide audience. And when i use my own Instagram I can see that many people are using the story function. So I think Instagram did a good job.