The news came from a short video published on Twitter (sic) on June 30. Adam Mosseri, who has been in charge of Instagram since the co-founders left the app, in conflict with the management of Facebook, his parent company, reveals the major topics of the moment.
He evokes the 4 main pillars on which one of the most popular networks among the younger generations is currently working:
- Creators
We are of course thinking here of the new paid formulas that are coming soon on the platform, according to the TechCrunch technology information site. Just like what Twitter recently unveiled with the Super Follow system, Instagram is considering paid subscription features to access exclusive content from creators. To be continued.
- Video
We will come back to that…
- Shopping
With the progressive shift from physical to electronic commerce, Instagram certainly wants its share of the pie.
- Messaging
Again, this topic stems from a recent change in user behaviour from news feeds to application messaging systems.
The strategic shift in video
But where the former executive of Facebook has put the accent, it’s the video! It is agreed upon that the sector is growing rapidly and is very competitive with the presence of Chinese giant, TikTok, in particular (the application is now more popular than Instagram among teenage Americans) and the inevitable YouTube.
Adam Mosseri then dropped this sentence:
We are no longer a square photo sharing app.”
A surprising statement when we know that it is through photography, precisely, that Instagram built its success in its beginnings and so far.
But we have to adapt to current trends. Instagram had already copied the Snapchat Story format at the time, which has since spread across all networks. Now, the fear comes from TikTok, which has become very successful, with little video clips over a music background.
The first reason people use Instagram is for entertainment.That’s what they expect from us. […] It means changes on our side to follow this trend of video entertainment,” says the Instagram manager.
What exactly will this entail in the coming months?
Adama Mosseri predicts a few months to see the concrete importance of this strategic shift. However, he points to some of the new experiences we can expect on Instagram in the future:
- Full screen videos
- Immersive videos
- Phone-friendly formats
This also refers to ongoing experiments on recommendations. In other words, there may be many more videos in the news feed, even from accounts that the user is not following yet. A bit like TikTok!
Remember that the subject is far from new for the firm bought by Facebook in 2012. In 2018, it attempted the subject with a dedicated application, IGTV. A relative success if we judge by the discreet removal, in January 2020, of the button leading to IGTV from Instagram. A quick death?
Recently, in August 2020, Instagram launched Reels, new 15-second video formats with creative effects, largely inspired by TikTok.
Obviously, the application seeks to go further today with this major strategic shift, a trend to be observed closely in the coming months for influencers and community managers. But that is not without risk because it will always have to satisfy the lovers of the first hour of the network which count for more than a billion monthly active users in the world.
