In my last article, I talked about Facebook’s massive downward spiral since early 2018. In an attempt to salvage the damage done, Facebook introduced a few contingencies. One of the few plans to survive this massive loss of confidence among users and investors was to pay more attention to Instagram as their salvation.
In April 2012 Facebook acquired Instagram for US$ 1 billion, the largest purchase they have ever made at the time. This brought Facebook into the mobile market, something they have been struggled with by themselves.
Ever since then, Instagram has mostly been left alone to grow by itself. In fact very little effort was put to monetize the platform, compared to the scale applied onto Facebook itself. But lately, all this changed. Since early this year, an unusually high number of new features have been introduced onto the platform.
In fact the aggressiveness of these updates and changes led to the departure of Instagram’s Co-Founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger[1]. This could be more than standard evolution of the app or coincidence. Rather it may be a sign they are looking for an alternative platform, in case Facebook cannot regain its position.
Updates to Improves User Experience
There was a long list of new features that increase user experience on Instagram. Although some may shrug them off as unnecessary and adding clutter to the perfectly simple platform, others found them helpful. Here are some prominent upgrades that happened in 2018:
1 Updated Algorithm
Instagram introduced a new algorithm that breaks away from the traditional chronological timeline where the most recent posts get seen first. Instead it now prioritizes posts that have more engagement like comments, likes, views, and saves.
What happens now is that Instagram will know if you engage with posts from some people and brands, then feed you more posts from them first assuming you want to see more of them.
2 Mute Accounts You Follow
Life isn’t always as easy as Following someone you like and unfollowing them when their posts become too obnoxious for your taste. There is also this zone where you don’t like seeing them on Instagram but still want to remain friends in real life.
For that, Instagram brought us the ability to mute people we follow. This simple features saved the friendships of millions from ending. One can now mute the posts and Stories of people they do not wish to appear on their account. And the recipient of this vile act would not even know.
3 Time-Spent Monitoring Feature[2]
2018 has been a year where social media and technology companies take Social Responsibility into their own hands. Apple and Google introduced new features in their Operating Systems that track and limit the number of hours we spend on devices.
Instagram also jumped on the bandwagon by introducing a few features to help keep users aware of the amount of time spent on the app. One such was a little note stating that users have caught up with all posts in the past 2 days. This helps remind users there are no more new posts beyond that point, and they can go explore elsewhere.
Another feature monitors the amount of time users spend on Instagram by showing a graph of the hours spent daily. It also allows users to set a daily reminder to ping when they reached the daily quota.
4 New cool stickers to increase engagement on Stories
Stories has been the best thing Instagram stole from Snapchat, because it created more success for them in the short year than it did for Snapchat.
In order to further boost the usage of Stories, Instagram introduced a collection of stickers that help content creators get engagement from followers. These stickers are able to obtain polls, ask questions, mention people and also add discoverable hashtags.
5 Bringing Categories to Explore tab[3]
The Explore tab on Instagram is a place users can sample some posts by others and possibly following them. Just last June, they added a section on the top that further categorizes the tab based on common preferences like DIY, Travel, Nature, Fitness, Science and Tech, and more. This better filters posts users want to see, instead of nonsensical viral content.
Collaborations with brands
While there are endless nooks and crannies for Facebook to monetize using ads, Instagram’s limited depth prove a less able platform. Which is why Facebook started experimenting on alternative ways to milk Instagram.
Although there hasn’t been proof that Instagram is already monetizing on their collaboration deals with the following brands, it at the very least can be a sample for future works with other brands.
1 Share Songs from Spotify[4]
Instagram introduced the ability to share songs from Spotify to Stories. It will appear as a post with a sticker of the song cover. Clicking the sticker will open up Spotify app and directly play that song.
By allowing this integration, Instagram can showcase all the songs that a user’s peers are listening to. They can then sample them on Spotify itself, and possibly even sign up for a paid account.
2 Share GoPro clips on Stories[5]
Much like the ability to share songs from Spotify to Instagram Stories, users can do the same with GoPro clips. Before this, uploading clips from action cameras can be troublesome and may require third-party apps.
In May 2018, GoPro launched an app that will directly share videos from the action camera to Stories without hassle. iOS users can even do it without the app.
3 Sharing Music in Stories[6]
Using copyrighted music on social media has always been an uphill battle. Many content creators struggle to find suitable audio and have to resort to buying expensive stock audio, because all commercial songs are protected from use.
Although one can still post a copyrighted song on Stories without being penalized, it is an incredibly amazing move by Instagram to introduce this new feature. Users can now play clips of a song legitimately on Stories to complement their video/image. And we would also like to believe that at the same time artists get paid.
This feature is still being rolled out to selected countries by stages as Instagram needs to obtain regional copyright permissions beforehand.
New standalone features
Having remained a photo and video sharing app for many years, Instagram recently started experimenting on other avenues for expansion. But because Instagram isn’t built and consumed the same way as Facebook, simply adding functions to the core platform will cause a negative reaction from users.
Instead, they began experimenting on standalone apps that somehow breakaway from the core platform, but at the same time still keep a foot in the doorway.
1 IGTV[7]
IGTV, short for Instagram Television, is their take on the YouTube world. It was built initially as a standalone but eventually evolved into a nice extension from Instagram’s core app without seeming intrusive.
The app tries to take on YouTube directly as a video-first social media platform, with a little twist in that it focuses on portrait mode videos instead of YouTube’s landscape. While the initial kick-off was a little slow, IGTV seems to be gaining a little bit of traction in the past months. But needless to say, the number of properly educational videos are still on YouTube’s court.
2 IG Shopping[8]
At the time this article was written, all we have on IG Shopping are speculations and closed-beta screenshots. But it is evident that Instagram is working on another standalone app for shopping, built as an extension of their core platform.
The purpose of IG Shopping is purely evolutionary: people are already looking out for products on their platform, why not give them a shopping cart and payment system as well?
But while Instagram is working to build an entire shopping platform from scratch, Snapchat just recently one-ups them by collaborating with Amazon and rolling out a working version instead.
It’s no mystery that Facebook is going on overdrive to turn Instagram into a money-making machine. But Instagram is a completely different beast, populated by users who are incredibly particular with how the app works.
Knowing full well the key to Instagram’s success is in its simplicity, how will the people at Menlo Park expand this service without turning it into the vast content wasteland that Facebook is today?
[1] “Instagram’s Co-Founders to Step Down From Company – The New ….” 24 Sep. 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/24/technology/instagram-cofounders-resign.html. Accessed 3 Oct. 2018.
[2] “Facebook and Instagram now show how many minutes … – TechCrunch.” 2 Aug. 2018, https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/01/facebook-and-instagram-your-activity-time/. Accessed 3 Oct. 2018.
[3] “Instagram’s redesigned Explore tab is the newest social … – Mashable.” 26 Jun. 2018, https://mashable.com/article/instagram-update-explore-tabs/. Accessed 3 Oct. 2018.
[4] “We’ve Made it Easier to Share Spotify to Instagram Stories – News ….” 1 May. 2018, https://artists.spotify.com/blog/we%27ve-made-it-easier-to-share-spotify-to-instagram-stories. Accessed 3 Oct. 2018.
[5] “Now You Can Share Your GoPro Moments Direct to Instagram Stories ….” https://investor.gopro.com/press-releases/press-release-details/2018/Now-You-Can-Share-Your-GoPro-Moments-Direct-to-Instagram-Stories/default.aspx. Accessed 3 Oct. 2018.
[6] “Introducing Music in Stories – Instagram.” 28 Jun. 2018, https://instagram-press.com/blog/2018/06/28/introducing-music-in-stories/. Accessed 3 Oct. 2018.
[7] “Welcome to IGTV – Instagram.” 20 Jun. 2018, https://instagram-press.com/blog/2018/06/20/welcome-to-igtv/. Accessed 3 Oct. 2018.
[8] “Instagram is building a standalone app for shopping – The Verge.” 4 Sep. 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/4/17819766/instagram-shopping-app-e-commerce. Accessed 3 Oct. 2018.
