Introduction
Earlier this year at July, the photographer Tati Bruening , who has more than 300k followers on instagram, created a petition condemning the recent change regarding recommendation algorithm on instagram.
This post has been shared by numerous influencers with billions of followers on instagram. And they all get the same feeling about instagram gradually becoming one of its biggest competitor, TikTok, but a lot less like it used to be: the photo-sharing app people love.
Background
Instagram was founded at 2010 and was bought by Facebook (now renamed to Meta) at 2012. At the very beginning, the primary focus of the app was to feature photo-sharing among friends and family. Users will expect instagram to feed content from who they are following, usually friends, family or influencers.
Instagram stories is probably one of the most successful and popular product that instagram has launched. They are usually at most one minute long and only available within 24 hours. The users can view the stories posted by their social network, creating the atmosphere of closely connected to their network. This spontaneity attracts billions of users and has successfully prolonged their stay on the app.
Lately, some users started to get content from outside of the accounts they are following, of which mostly are short video clips. This came along with another feature that Instagram is pushing , Reels.
Some view this broader shift as an attempt to copy the business model of TikTok, and consider Reels to be “TikTok Clone”. There is indeed some similarities between the user interface of Reels and TikTok. But there is more than just the UI that make Instagram “less Instagram”.
UI Comparison : Reels (Up) vs. tiktok (Down)
People go to Instagram expect to see contents posted from the people the follow because these are what they care about the most. Yet with Instagram new attempt to “help you discover new and interesting things on Instagram that you might not know even exist” said by Adam Mosseri , the head of Instagram, users will see unexpected content created by total strangers, and unfamiliar dashboards that are not all about their known social network. People start to feel that Instagram is not the same Instagram it used to be, hence start appealing “ Make Instagram Instagram again. ”
Instagram v.s. TikTok
Competitor
TikTok is one of Instagram’s biggest competitors. It grows to one billion users in about half the time that it took Instagram to grow that large.
To reclaim user attention and advertising revenue, Instagram has attempted to make itself more like TikTok to capture more attention among the youth. Mark Zuckerberg has said to expect the percentage of content on Instagram change as a result of recommendations from outside the social graph continue to increase.
In Meta Q2 2022 Report, it was reported that Reels made up 20% of user engagement on Instagram at last quarter and has gained 30% increase in this quarter. The promising statistics encourages Meta to continue highlight Reels as a way to compete against TikTok. Much to their surprise, this updated recommendation algorithm brought an intense pushback from the users.
Algorithm
The main difference between Instagram and TikTok are their algorithms, which leads to different uses behaviours.
Instagram operates based on social network. It collects the digital habits of the users including who they are following, what have they liked or commented and then determine what to stream to the users. Instagram users expect to see posts regarding their known social network, and the user interactions within community is more active.
TikTok relies less on user input or social networking. It generates the feed using almost entirely its AI algorithm. The app does not value community engagement as much as Instagram does because the algorithm shows new content to new users without them explicitly seeking it out.
By mocking TikTok, meta is losing its users instead of capturing existing TikTok users to Instagram. It is vital to understand that Instagram can never become a better version of TikTok because essentially, they are different social networks and the intention people use which apps are different. If the users want to keep most to date on what is happening to their social networks, they will go to Instagram. If the users want to go check what outside their social networks is happening, they will go to TikTok.
Meta should draw a clear line about the product positioning of Instagram to “make Instagram Instagram again”, instead of copying TikTok’s product positioning to Instagram.
References
https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/instagram-is-walking-back-its-controversial-changes-its-an-important-reminder-that-failure-isnt-your-enemy.html
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/102615/story-instagram-rise-1-photo0sharing-app.asp
https://www.howtogeek.com/684600/what-is-instagram-reels-and-is-it-a-tiktok-clone/