In some potentially surprising news recently released, Instagram Stories users and usage has now surpassed the on-demand social giant Snapchat, garnering 250M users per month. Snapchat rings in at just 160M daily users.
While the implications of this are big, we’re already seeing effects of the aftershock. Upon this news, Snapchat stock sank to an all-time low of $12.67. Dropping stock is nothing new, though, as the share price has generally been declining in the past year, and is well below the IPO price.
How did such a behemoth fall so easily? It seemed Snapchat was a fresh look at social media poised to stand with Facebook and Twitter. The answer is fairly simple and doesn’t require much analysis – Facebook leveraged it’s massive userbase in Instagram and simply copied most of the features Snapchat provides in both Instagram Stories and Instagram Direct (quick, temporary photo messages).
The more relevant question to us is: what does this mean for agencies and marketing? For now, probably not much. Snapchat is still gaining active users every day (though that growth is starting to stagnate) and should still be the target for certain social campaigns. Custom Snapchat filters will still have their role in branding. But, this signals that possibly more attention should be brought to Instagram. More and more advertisers are turning to Instagram simply for the already large and growing reach the platform offers along with its granular targeting and retargeting capabilities.
Any advertising you’re currently running through Snapchat can probably be supplemented with Instagram Stories. As both companies compete, new features and methods of advertising become available. We’ll do our best to announce new ways of social marketing as they’re announced.
Snapchat isn’t dead in the water just yet, but we think they’ll have to continually roll out new features faster than Instagram can copy them. Without doing that, the once champion of Silicon Beach may be washed away into the Pacific.