TikTok VS Instagram. Who is winning and why we should care.
Instagram have recently released ‘Reels’ whilst Tik Tok have retaliated by announcing that they will soon start paying their creators. This is the perfect time to assess the battle between two social media giants and ask why we should care about the result.
In 2019, Tik Tok was the 4th most downloaded app whilst instagram came in at 3rd.
In March 2020, the whole world started to experience the effects of the Covid-19 outbreak. People were forced into lockdown to either work from home or to stop working altogether. Although not a great month for affected individuals, Tik Tok saw exponential growth of 115.2 million installs. For comparison, Instagram only averaged 111.5M downloads per quarter in 2019.
The graph below is a screenshot taken from google trends which shows how popular each term is. As we can clearly see from the chart, Tik Tok is closing the gap whilst Instagram is maintaining popularity.
Tik Tok is the underdog in this battle, created in 2016, Instagram has a 6 year advantage. Instagram has become a favourite amongst photographers, food bloggers and online businesses because of the potential reach and the ability to monetise from posts/shoutouts and stories. Meanwhile Tik Tok is renowned for its short videos which has allowed content creators to share their ’15 second talents’ to the world. In March 2020, instagram saw an increase of Tik Tok content on their platform, this urged many influencers to migrate to Tik Tok in the attempt to gain an unsaturated audience. Speculation would suggest this could be the cause of the spike seen in March-June 2020.
How are instagram fighting back
It is understandable that Instagram want to protect their brand image, they have not been oblivious to Tik Tok’s growth and have been making subtle moves to eliminate or at least slow down the growth of the short video media platform.
- Instagram stories — Introduced in November 2016, 2 months after the release of Tik Tok
- IGTV — Introduced in June 2018, aimed to create a global community
- Reels — Introduced in 2020 after the sharp increase in TikTok content being shown on instagram.
Instagram are doing everything they can to compete and stay ahead of Tik Tok, influencers and small business utilise instagram for the monetisation opportunities and this is what is keeping instagram ahead of the game. From being on instagram myself and running a number of business and theme pages I know that an influencer with approximately 10,000 followers can earn up to $100 per post, whilst accounts with 500,000 followers can expect to be paid anywhere between $600-£1000 per post. Monetisation via Tik Tok is far more difficult, that is up until recently (August 2020).
Tik Tok is not going down without a fight
In august 2020, Tik Tok announced that they will begin paying their top content creators. Instagram do not currently pay their users to create content. This is a massive deal for creators and anyone that likes creating content, this includes influencers and businesses. With Tik Tok paying for content, creators will be more motivated to post engaging content consistently. It would not be surprising if more instagram users start to spend more time on Tik Tok with the aim of being monetised.
Why we should care
Social media is a significant part of our lives. Whether it be personal or business purposes, we will encounter it some way shape or form. Now i’m not suggesting we all go shut down our facebook accounts and jump to Tik Tok and Instagram but the trends show a movement to a different type of technology. One where at a click of a button you can be dancing with someone else on the other side of the world, or singing with your family across time zones, It’s important that we are aware that the ability to do this exists. There are hundreds of opportunities to be had on both Instagram and Tik Tok, it has never been easier to ‘go viral’.
Thank you for reading.
Sources — Tik Tok. Instagram. Google trends. Petalcard.com. BBC News. Financial Times.
