In 2020, the world is at a standstill. With the Covid-19 pandemic, millions of people are confined. To combat boredom, many install the application of the moment “TikTok”. But the social network, a direct descendant of Musicaly, owned by ByteDance in China, is unable to appeal to the general public.
Quickly, other social networks, Instagram in the lead, took up the flagship concept of TikTok. Short videos, often silent, in vertical format. A great first for the world of entertainment, accustomed since the emergence of television to the horizontal format, naturally slower.
While everyone is using the “TikTok” recipe, from Facebook to YouTube and even X (formerly Twitter), only Instagram seems able to compete with the Chinese phenomenon, which is gaining millions of subscribers every week.
Instagram: copy then exceed?
Instagram’s success in vertical formats could seem like a stroke of luck if there had not already been precedents. In 2013, Instagram had already launched its stories just a few months after the emergence of Snapchat which then had a very similar (if not identical) functionality.
So when Instagram launches its real in the heart of summer 2020, the fate of TikTok seems sealed. Although the Chinese giant continues its march forward today, the arrival of competitors on the North American continent, with Instagram in the lead, has significantly slowed down the ambitions of ByteDance and its social network.
Long dedicated to photographers, the Instagram application has gone through several eras. After the photos of cats and breakfasts, it was time for stories. Each time the social network has gained new subscribers, without losing its oldest users.
The application has thus managed to seduce, again and again, becoming the social network of everyone. Today, the whole world uses Instagram. If TikTok panics the counters with figures each larger than the other, the second most used social network in the world (behind Facebook) is its little sister, Instagram.
In France, in 2023, the application counted 26 million active users (at least one connection per month). It’s still less than Facebook and YouTube, but it’s still much more than TikTok (between 10 and 15 million) and Snapchat.
Even among 15-24 year olds, who are TikTok’s core target, the Californian social network remains in the lead. The app is used on average 5.1 times per day compared to 3.4 times for TikTok. Only Snapchat is ahead of its two competitors, with an average of 6 activations per day.
Another interesting figure for Instagram, the application is becoming more and more equal. Even if its audience is still predominantly female, the figures are trending in the same direction. In 2020, 46% of users were men, there will be 2% more in 2023.
Ultimately, the success of Reels on Instagram can be explained in two ways. The first is the perfect understanding of the phenomenon of short formats. Instagram has managed to seize the trend by capitalizing on an already very large audience.
The second strong point of the application is this audience. Always more numerous and diversified, it also knows how to be faithful to the application, despite the arrival of new competitors. Instagram existed before Snapchat and overtook its competitor by playing its own game. Mark Zuckerberg’s social network is now trying to do the same, but with an opponent of a completely different caliber, TikTok.
