Instagram’s Existential Questions
Instagram’s Stories feature is very popular. But what does this mean for the company’s overall business strategy? Could it mean disaster? Find out here…
By all accounts, Instagram’s choice to “borrow” Snapchat’s main feature has been a success. Usership is high, and people are spending more time on the network than ever. In fact, Instagram has reportedly succeeded in getting more people using its own version of Stories than the whole of Snapchat. As The Verge recently put it, this “singular feature of Instagram [is)] more popular than all of Snapchat, the app that popularized stories as a concept and Facebook’s mortal enemy in the war for teen mindshare.”
Why is Stories so successful?
The ephemerality of Stories—regardless of what network it’s on—is what makes them so appealing to users. Since a photo isn’t going to be around forever, users feel less discerning about when and what to post, meaning they use the network more and more. This reflects what younger users increasingly want from social media:
Fewer hyper-curated posts that hang around forever, and more of-the-moment ephemerality that doesn’t last longer than 24 hours and therefore doesn’t leave a long digital trail.
As Alex Hearn in the Guardian wrote: “This is why copying Snapchat’s Stories wasn’t just a small moment of aggressive competition between two social networks, but an existential need for Instagram.”
However, as Instagram Stories are becoming increasingly popular with users, could it be that Instagram has incentivized people away from posting in its feed? This could present another kind of existential problem for Instagram. Without user content that lives in perpetuity on the platform, Instagram can’t amass, store and analyze the same amount of data for users. Without that data, it can’t offer the same value proposition to advertisers, which is what its business model is based on.
Instagram Business Model Shift
Instagram seems to be aware that if there are less and less traditional posts on the platform, that’s a threat to its business model. This is typified by the trend of “hyper-curation.” Especially among young users, it’s customary to delete posts which don’t perform well, as users are aware they are creating a digital footprint they will be judged by as long as they’re profile is active. This is perhaps why Instagram just rolled out a feature allowing users to “archive” photos and leave them hidden from public view, without deleting them from the network forever. As Hearn said: “Who does that appeal to more than those users who would otherwise be deleting that content from the app’s servers forever.”
Instagram essentially needs two things to stay competitive:
- The first is a growing number users who want to spend a growing amount of time on the platform.
- The second is data collected from those users that they can analyze and sell to advertisers.
We can’t know for sure if the data Instagram collects from Stories is less valuable in for advertisers when compared to the data it collects from traditional posts. But the 24 hour lifespan of Stories does present a limited time window from which Instagram can collect data.
In addition, we also know that there have been complaints from users who use Instagram as a brand-building platform who find that Stories are drawing down the engagement from their posts. A survey conducted by the website IconSquare found “a global decrease in engagement over 3 weeks, dropping from 1.11% to 0.94% – which is a decrease of around 15%. We imagine the level of engagement on traditional posts will continue to fall as more and more users switch their attention over to Stories.”
For now, Instagram is clearly pleased their big gamble to replicate another social media platform and prompt users to switch over worked like a charm. But it remains to be seen if, in a commercial sense, they will fall victim to their own success in this regard.