According to Statista, Instagram has over 1.2 billion users and ranks fifth in the list of the most popular social networks worldwide. Instagram was primarily known as a photo-sharing service and now wants to lean into the trend of video to cover new user groups and to stay current.
Recently the director of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, has published a tweet in which he says that Instagram will be more video-friendly to follow the success of competitors like Youtube and TikTok. The service “should no longer be considered an image sharing app”, and Instagram will make it easier for content creators, as well as focus on shopping and messaging services. Basically, Instagram decides to “embrace video more broadly” by creating a full-screen, immersive, entertaining, mobile-first experience, and just like Mosseri puts it, to be a general entertainment app driven by algorithms and videos.
Instagram has had a full-screen video function available for content on IGTV, Reels, and Stories, we just wait and see what changes they will make to embrace video more broadly.
In recent years and now during the pandemic, the company has witnessed changes in consumer habits and the increasing number of online shops. Therefore, shopping will be a focus area in the future too. We surely will encounter much more advertisements in the app (speechless). In addition, communicating with each other directly is much more preferred than publishing on their own profile nowadays, thus Instagram will put more effort into the messaging.
There’s one more thing worth mentioning, we will receive suggestions in our own feed on new topics that we may be interested in. We should also be able to have the opportunity to choose what kind of content we want to see more of or less of. It’s still vague what it will be like since they are still experimenting, but we can get some ideas from other entertainment apps we are using now.
