From Picture Perfect to In-the-Moment Sharing: Is Stories a New Chapter in Content Sharing on Instagram?
Three years ago, Snapchat revolutionized social media with the release of Stories, an update that allows users to post content that disappears after 24 hours. This platform has exploded among users, its popularity and success evident in the fact that over 500 million Snapchat Stories are created every day and that number only continues to grow as new features are added to the platform.
Instagram recently caught onto the success of this method of sharing content and released its own tweaked version of the platform, paving the way for a new method of sharing content on Instagram.
This new update lives at the top of users’ newsfeeds and allows users to post photos and videos to create a “story” directly in feed that lasts only 24 hours. Because the Stories platform is minimally invasive, users can post as much content as they want without feeling as though they are spamming their friends.
The marketing implications of Instagram Stories are huge. Say that as a brand, you decide to share similar content on Instagram Stories that you shared on Snapchat from an event you are sponsoring. Just by deciding to share it on Instagram rather than or in addition to Snapchat, your reach has automatically doubled. Similar content that was previously reaching 150 million daily users on Snapchat is now reaching 300 million daily users just because you decided to share it on Instagram as well.
With the larger user base Instagram enjoys comes a more diverse user base, some of which may not be familiar with the Stories platform. This poses a challenge for Instagram: how do you make a platform self-explanatory enough such that users unfamiliar with it can easily learn how to use it without frustrating users who already know how to? Instagram’s solution was brilliant. They took Snapchat’s wildly successful Stories platform and added instructions directly into the interface in a minimally invasive way so as not to disrupt the story-sharing experience. By including directions on how to use the new update, such as the explicit “Send Message” button that allows users to easily reply to a photo, Instagram has made the Stories platform accessible to an older demographic that already existed on Instagram but was unfamiliar with Stories without altering the experience for younger users familiar with the platform.
The release of Instagram Stories means that content posted on Instagram is changing. Having long been the platform where users shared only their best photos, Instagram Stories now encourages posting quick, unedited content from the moments in between the polished ones highlighted on your feed. Much like what brands currently post on their own Snapchat Stories or in Ads Between Stories, content posted on Instagram Stories will have to match the quality of the content posted by everyday users on the platform. However, the same content that is used for Snapchat Stories cannot be used for Instagram Stories as well because of the older demographic that is now using the ‘Stories’ platform. So while the optimization of content posted on Instagram Stories can mimic that of the content on Snapchat, the subject of the content itself will differ among the two platforms to appeal to this older demographic.
As a major platform that is just days old, how it will actually roll out and be used among users is still yet to be seen and how it will actually be used among users could turn out to be much different than expected. What we do know is that Snapchat revolutionized the content-sharing experience when it released Stories back in 2013 and now that Instagram has adopted that feature as well, only time will tell how this update will play out among users and brands alike.
