Both Meta and Snapchat have recently remarked that they see TikTok as competition, and the future of social media. And looking at how Instagram and Snapchat work now, I’m really not surprised.
Snapchat
In a quarterly earnings report to investors, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said that less time is being spent watching Snapchat’s Stories from friends—even though the company had hoped Stories engagement would pick up as COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns eased. However, Spiegel said that users are getting more into watching videos on Spotlight—the app’s TikTok rival where people can watch videos from random creators.
“While we are hopeful our community will in time return to the friends story behaviors that we observed prior to the pandemic, we are focused on innovating on our content offerings to better serve our community today,” added Speigel.
I personally haven’t used Snapchat for what it seems like years, and I really don’t know why I still have it—apart from checking it today to see what else Snapchat had to offer. It used to be an easy-to-use social media app where we keep up with what our friends are doing during the day, kind of like how we use Instagram’s Stories feature today. But now, it seems really outdated and irrelavant.
After checking out a bit of what Snapchat’s Spotlight feature is, it’s basically its own version of TikTok. Its got the familiar Snapchat font when users want to add words to their videos, and Snapchat Sounds—which lets you make content using sounds posted by professional artists.
Meta
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook parent company Meta, also named TikTok a threat to his social media empire during Meta’s fourth-quarter earnings call. He noted Facebook has not had to deal with a major rival like TikTok during its previous strategy shifts, describing the situation as “somewhat unique”.
“People have a lot of choices for how they want to spend their time, and apps like TikTok are growing very quickly,” he continued.
Instagram, one of Meta’s social media platforms, has its own TikTok copycat feature called Reels. Unlike Snapchat’s attempt, Reels is fairly popular for users who are interested in TikTok but aren’t bothered to download TikTok. Instagram also narrowly beat TikTok as the most downloaded app in the last quarter of 2021—but only narrowly.
I didn’t need to take another look at Instagram’s Reels feature myself, as I’m fairly familiar with how it works. As a TikTok user myself, I’m not the type to scroll through Reels as I think that they mostly report old TikTok videos anyway. But it’s popular enough to have the feature be a permanent Instagram feature—it’s not going away anytime soon.
Additonally, it was recently reported that Facebook has lost daily users for the first time in its 18-year history, partly thanks to TikTok. Facebook lost around 500,000 daily users in the last three months of 2021, falling from 1.93 billion logging in around the world each day to 1.929 billion.
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