Instagram Emerges from Facebook Shadow

Instagram Emerges from Facebook Shadow

The social networking portal Instagram irst launched in 2010 as a free app for iOS - and, back then, it was clear where Instagram’s focus was. In a post on its Tumblr blog, Instagram enthused that it “makes mobile photos fast, simple and beautiful”. In the years since then, the site has incorporated an increasing number of new features and picked up hundreds of millions of new users along the way. These eforts have
culminated in the unveiling of its new long-form video platform IGTV.

HOW INSTAGRAM HAS MUSHROOMED IN POPULARITY
In June, Instagram announced that its tally of monthly active users had reached 1 billion. This places the site in a very exclusive one-billion club that includes WeChat with a billion users, WhatsApp with 1.5 billion and Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, with 2.2 billion. It’s all according to igures shared by Axios, which also observes that Instagram has added about 200 million users even since September. When Facebook acquired Instagram in April 2012, the total stood at 50 million users.
How has Instagram built up such considerable popularity so quickly? For many people, it’s not diicult to discern how. After all, the site has gradually loosened its focus on photo-sharing, allowing its users to share video in a manner that is becoming even more extensive with the introduction of IGTV. While user-shared videos on the network have usually been limited in length to one minute, this maximum length has been extended to an hour for IGTV, making it a YouTube competitor.

Over the years, many competitors have popped up aiming to take user share from established social media behemoths like Instagram. However, the site has acted to nullify such threats. For example, reportedly on the request of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Instagram introduced Instagram Stories, which closely replicates the Stories feature of social media upstart Snapchat. Within a year, Instagram’s growth surged while Snapchat’s tapered off.

INSTAGRAM CREATES A “TV NETWORK”: IGTV
In many ways, IGTV doesn’t feel like a mere social media feature; instead, it could be branded a TV network with the potential to grow significantly in both content and user numbers. Such growth could be fuelled by multimedia contributions from both celebrities and normal people alike.

Nonetheless, the Independent has remarked: “It seems clear that the feature is made primarily for celebrities and bigger channels to make, and for normal people to watch on.”

In justiication of this viewpoint, the news site points to the difficulty in quickly discerning how to add IGTV programming on your own volition.
Nonetheless, if you want to add fresh content, you can proceed towards doing so if you open the recently-released IGTV app, hit your proile picture beside a cog symbol on the interface’s right side, and then take yourself through numerous on-screen steps. Right now, video can’t be made within the app, but you can use separate video-recording software.

IGTV itself, so-named as a reminder of traditional television, will also be available as part of the main Instagram app. At the San Francisco launch event for IGTV, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom observed that “teens are now watching 40% less TV than they did ive years ago,” adding: “It’s time for video to move forward and evolve.” There have been further indicators of how Instagram itself is set to “move forward and evolve” in response to market trends and user behavior.

A VERY PROMISING FUTURE FOR INSTAGRAM
Despite Instagram having lifted the one-minute restriction on videos shared on the network, it remains clear that the site wants us to be more mindful of how much time we are spending on it. TechCrunch recently previewed Instagram’s Time Well Spent tool, which will enable users to more easily track how much time they spend on the site. Systrom tweeted that the feature was coming, insisting that “understanding how time online impacts people is important”.

He added that “it’s the responsibility of all companies to be honest about this”. Indeed, Apple and Google have already announced similar time management features, respectively called Screen Time and Digital Wellbeing, for inclusion in future software updates for their mobile operating systems iOS and Android.  However, unlike Google’s effort, Time Well Spent won’t stop users continuing to access the app once a usage limit has been reached; it is instead meant to foster self-policing.

Therefore, for better or worse, Instagram users can remain free to burn up much of their time watching video content on IGTV. They can make such content, too, of course - and Zed Pro Media has posted this YouTube video guide to doing so effectively. On the subject of YouTube, that’s an obvious rival for IGTV – but how large a threat will the Instagram challenger really pose? In a separate YouTube video, Marques Brownlee has given his thoughts.

IN THE VIDEO ZONE - AND NOT JUST WITH INSTAGRAM
Facebook has made various attempts to establish itself as a video platform, with the streaming portal Facebook Live and video-ondemand service Facebook Watch both good examples. While not all of its eforts in this space have taken of, Facebook remains strongly incentivized to keep pace in the video space.

As advertisements placed beside videos bring Facebook and Instagram more money, both sites could understandably be very eager to get more of their users watching video.
We can expect many other social media sites to further take up the video-sharing mantle. Video streaming has grown particularly rapidly in prominence on social networks, encouraged by huge enhancements in global bandwidth and data speeds, as Entrepreneur notes. In a prediction on its new IGTV site, Instagram itself has forecast that, within three years, mobile video content will be responsible for nearly 80% of total mobile data traic.

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE, THE MORE THINGS STAY THE SAME

despite the many exciting opportunities which social media’s growing embrace of video sharing could unlock, it does raise the question of how social media sites of the future will endeavor to distinguish themselves. Just last year, Facebook launched its own Stories feature and has continued to push and expand the feature, despite criticism that it has once again copied Snapchat.

Unsurprisingly, another common criticism has been that, for Facebook, Instagram Stories already suiced, given that Facebook is the owner of Instagram. Nonetheless, Facebook has been attempting to smooth the break between the two diferent Stories features, as the company has enabled Instagram Stories to be automatically reposted as Facebook Stories.

With both Facebook and Instagram continuing to diversify their oferings, could we soon reach a point where it seems diicult to discern major diferences between these two social networks?

There are already signs that the social media market is becoming oversaturated. Facebook’s feature palette has broadened so signiicantly that choosing which of the features to prioritize promoting can be an obvious struggle for the site. Hence, some features are largely buried after their debut.

Nonetheless, the future of social media as a whole is exciting. Facebook might even inally succeed in circumventing some of the censorship which has seen its services, including Instagram, blocked in China.

Entrepreneur points to on G.social, one startup that has put together a block chain-based social media platform. With this platform, users can send information to multiple social networks with just one click and, in the process, potentially reach people in countries subject to Internet censorship.

by Benjamin Kerry & Gavin Lenaghan