Instagram Stories Versus Snapchat Stories

Instagram stories vs. Snapchat. The best story will win, it always does. Instagram has just released Instagram stories, obviously in direct competition to Snapchat.

Stories will appear at the top of your feed in a bar. Identified by a colour ring around either a friend's profile or an account you follow.

Sentiment initially from the Instagram community was not popular at least on the feed. However, this is no different from the feeling users had when Instagram rolled out their algorithm. Or for that matter introduced advertising.

In fact, as of October 2019 300M users interact with Instagram Stories daily, with 190 million on Snapchat. Instagram continues to move forward both in growth and engagement. Now with over 1 billion active users, early sentiment by the community and future behaviour never seem to correlate.

Facebook initially acquired Instagram for 1 billion dollars, but as of yesterday, the valuation was close to $100 billion. Not a bad return in anyone’s world.

You may recall that Facebook initially tried to acquire Snapchat as well, but Evan Spiegel rejected a $3 billion dollar offer.

Many industry commentators felt this was the right move by Evan. No doubt influenced by the success of Instagram.

Mobile is the new media frontier and the platform that connects the most users with the highest engagement wins. It is as simple as that.

I hold the belief that when the dust settles, we will see one or two major social media platforms emerge. And the rest will simply be noise.

Facebook's mission to connect the world clearly remains its driving force. Instagram stories are only a small part of the Facebook story (pardon the pun).