TikTok has become a threat to Meta’s reign, so much so that even Instagram is copying its virtues.
TikTok has become a threat to the reign of Meta (parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp) for several reasons:
- It has exponential growth.
- Since 2021 it is the most downloaded app of the year .
- It easily reached 1 billion monthly users .
- It has excellent performance in all markets (Europe, Asia, USA, Latin America, Middle East and North Africa).
- Its popularity among American Generation Z (those born between 1997 and 2021) is higher than that of Instagram .
We are in the same context in which Snapchat , with its filters and the invention of stories , began to scratch Mark Zuckerberg’s platforms in 2016. A new audiovisual concept was then generated based on the impact of the ephemeral .
Instagram responded by successfully and shamelessly copying the model of stories that disappear in 24 hours . In fact, Kevin Weil, one of its directors, came to say that copying is the way technology companies work and that good ideas start in one place and then spread throughout the industry.
It has not worked for Instagram to copy TikTok
However, Instagram has imposed the tiktokization of its platform on all its users, prioritizing video ( reels ) over photographs and resorting to the algorithm to see stories and content from other users and not from the friends they follow.
This has generated a wave of indignation among some instagramers , who accuse a loss of identity of the platform. In fact, thousands of users have signed the Change.org petition Make Instagram Instagram Again: Stop Trying To Be TikTok, I Just Want To See Pretty Pictures Of My Friends .
Faced with the wave of criticism, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, has declared: “If we do not fail at some time, it is because we are not thinking big enough or daring enough .” However, in a video statement he also made it clear that “to be honest, the video is going to have more and more weight on Instagram.”
The future of Meta goes through the video
Tiktok has been able to attract new content creators, it has built an algorithm that quickly catches the user by offering them videos of interest as soon as they enter the social network. In addition, he has been able to monetize it, so his income is increasingly higher.
For its part, Meta is aware of this situation and knows that the future of social networks depends on videocentrism . Instagram does not want to have the same end as Fotolog , but it has to develop and consolidate its video use strategy.
It is estimated that by 2022, 82% of all internet traffic will be video .