Tik Tok — Instagram’s Newest Foe
Since its inception, Instagram has always tried to innovate. When Facebook (Instagram’s parent company) couldn’t buyout Snapchat, they instead decided to add their own feature called stories, which was identical to the ones that made Snapchat so popular and turned out to be a gigantic hit for the platform. Well, the newest competitor making waves on social media is Tik Tok. Tik Tok is an app similar to Vine of yesteryear, people upload short clips of themselves doing everything from lip syncing to short comedy bits. It is gaining a ton of exposure with videos not only getting millions of views on the app itself, but being shared voraciously on all forms of social media, even on Instagram. Obviously this isn’t what Instagram wants, but Mark Zuckerberg and co are not about to sit idly and let this happen without some push back. Back in November, Instagram released a feature called “Reels” in Brazil. This new feature is eerily similar to how Tik Tok operates, and now they are adding new editing features worldwide that are extremely similar to ones already on Tik Tok. This is obviously no coincidence. As Haidee Chu of Mashable reports, Mark Zuckerberg stated his intentions in a meeting about how they want to take on Tik Tok and their userbase. He stated,
“[TikTok] married short-form, immersive video with browse. So it’s almost like the Explore Tab that we have on Instagram,” Zuckerberg said in the leaked meeting. “I kind of think about TikTok as if it were Explore for stories, and that were the whole app … So we have a number of approaches that we’re going to take towards this.” (Chu Mashable.com)
This seems like Zuckerberg views Tik Tok as a big competitor for the giant that is Instagram. It also raises questions of how powerful Instagram can be as a platform. Everyone knows how important of a tool it is for marketing and outreach, but its ability to take on any app that looks to cut into its profits is scary. It limits competition which in turn will limit innovation in the future. Outside of Twitter, any big social platform that rises up looks to either accept Facebook’s offer to buy them, or risk their innovation being recreated quickly by Facebook.
Daniel Lavalette
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