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?
