It’s been six months since the Facebook owned Instagram decided to launch Instagram Stories; a feature that you can simply describe as one started by rival Snapchat. The thing is, they didn’t even change the name but and for those who have taken out time to count just how many times Facebook has copied Snapchat, we hear the number is now a whopping 15 and that’s not why you’re reading this. We are told that Instagram Stories now has about 150 million active daily users and to make the feature even more popular, they extended it to the Explore tab two months after launching the feature. Instagram’s Explore feature now has over 100 million active daily users too and you can see why they had to extend Stories to that section too.
But here is the thing, the whole thing is now taking its toll on Snapchat. According to a TechCrunch report which they say came from Snapchat analytics providers, brands are now reporting declines in Snapchat Stories usage. The decline according to the report ranges from 15 percent to 40 percent. Stars are seeing their Snapchat numbers drop while their Instagram numbers are up but could the reason simply be because Instagram stole their idea or has more firepower because of its parent company, Facebook? That’s what analysts are debating. From the excerpts below, experts actually believe Snapchat is not doing much to make advertisers and marketers happy with its style that tends to favour a certain age group. Facebook on the other hand is better when it comes to ads and they have been able to convert Instagram Stories into what marketers like. Facebook has over the years grown to be the number two in the digital ads space only second to Google with 12 percent share of the market versus Google’s 31 percent market share.
Here are excerpts from the TechCrunch report.
“Overall, from August to November 2016, the average unique viewers per Snapchat Story has decreased about 40%” says Nick Cicero, CEO of creative studio and social video analytics platform Delmondo. His company analyzed 21,500 Snapchat Stories to discover the steep decline……A leading social media talent company’s co-founder tells me that amongst the stars they work with, “Almost all of them are down about 20 to 25 percent on Snapchat” since August.” One of their creators was seeing 75,000 opens per Story in August, and only 50,000 now. Another went from 50,000 to 30,000. Meanwhile, the stars are seeing 6 to 10 percent of their Instagram followers opening their Instagram Stories each day, which the co-founder called “really f*cking high”.
“Marketers are dedicating more resources to Instagram because you can’t grow on Snapchat. Now there’s a lot of campaigns we don’t even need to do on Snapchat.”, they say. “The only way to grow is from [cross-promoting on] YouTube or Instagram. Snapchat is making some of the same mistakes as Vine. They aren’t embracing creators. They want to be private messaging.” In contrast, Instagram promotes social media stars and helps them grow their Stories views by featuring them on its Explore tab that Snapchat lacks.
But depending on your brand and what you offer, they (Instagram and Snapchat) both offer unique opportunities. The analysis from Salesforce on both platforms is interesting in that it even hints you on when to place Stories on both platforms.
We have embedded that below for you to make better decision when it comes to using both platforms.
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