This is a guest contribution from Nick Rojas.
When Instagram unveiled its new Stories usa bu platform in early August, the social network made no bones about that the fact that it was inspired by Snapchat’s pioneering feature of the same name. Some social media watchers went even further, calling it a blatant ripoff.
In less than a month, however, many marketers updated 2024 mobile phone number data are have already concluded that Instagram Stories is more than just an alternative to Snapchat Stories. There is a growing movement of advertisers who consider Instagram Stories to be a genuine improvement over its predecessor.
Is Instagram now a better place to host content than Snapchat, the originator of the Stories format?
Some recent converts would ask you only to look at the facts.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock
Instagram Stories: A Much Larger, More Diverse Group of ‘Painters’
When it was first released in 2013, Snapchat Stories was revolutionary, but Snapchat allowed it to idle by leaving it virtually unchanged. In an article for The Next Web, Bryan Clark wrote that Stories “needed exactly what Instagram gave it — a new coat of paint, and a new audience to do the painting.”
Let’s start with the painters.
Snapchat is now and has always been a platform overwhelmingly dominated by young people — a full 85 percent of users are 13-35 years old. While millennials are a coveted demographic, marketers value diversity. Instagram is not only far more diverse when it comes to the age of its users, but its user base is nearly equally split between men and women.
The other user statistic that can’t be ignored is the one that reveals Instagram’s sheer reach and muscle. 20 percent of Internet users are on Instagram, including more than one-quarter of all Americans. The image-based social channel boasts 500 million monthly users — 300 million of whom are daily users.
Snapchat, on the other hand, claims 100 million daily users.
Instagram Can do Everything Snapchat Can do and More
It’s not just the number of painters and their online kockarnice protiv zemaljskih kockarnica demographic diversity that makes Instagram so attractive to marketers, it’s how the network enables them to paint.
Snapchat limits users to the fleeting story format, which dooms content to a 24-hour shelf life. Instagram, on the other hand has both feed and Stories tracks. This gives marketers the option of targeting users with Stories, which are authentic and engaging. Unlike Snapchat, Instagram also has a permanent feed. If content is successful on the short-lived Stories track, marketers can display it permanently on their feeds.
