Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

Send To Pod

Original Article: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

Convert your long form article to podcast? Visit SendToPod

Follow me on Twitter to find out more.
----

---

Back in 2010, during my first year of Business School, I helped give a presentation entitled “Twitter 101”:

My section was “The Twitter Value Proposition”, and after admitting that yes, you can find out what people are eating for lunch on Twitter, I stated “The truth is you can find anything you want on Twitter, and that’s a good thing.” The Twitter value proposition was that you could “See exactly what you need to see, in real-time, in one place, and nothing more”; I illustrated this by showing people how they could unfollow me:

The point was that Twitter required active management of your feed, but if you put in the effort, you could get something uniquely interesting to you that was incredibly valuable.

Most of the audience didn’t take me up on it.

Facebook Versus Instagram

If there is one axiom that governs the consumer Internet — consumer anything, really — it is that convenience matters more than anything. That was the problem with Twitter: it just wasn’t convenient for nearly enough people to figure out how to follow the right people. It was Facebook, which digitized offline relationships, that dominated the social media space.

Facebook’s social graph was the ultimate growth hack: from the moment you created an account Facebook worked assiduously to connect you with everyone you knew or wish you knew from high school, college, your hometown, workplace, you name an offline network and Facebook digitized it. Of course this meant that there were far too many updates and photos to keep track of, so Facebook ranked them, and presented them in a feed that you could scroll endlessly.

Users, famously, hated the News Feed when it was first launched: Facebook had protesters outside their doors in Palo Alto when it was introduced, and far more online; most were, ironically enough, organized on Facebook. CEO Mark Zuckerberg penned an apology:

We really messed this one up. When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I’d like to try to correct those errors now…

The errors to be corrected were better controls over what might be shared; Facebook did not give the users what they claimed to want, which was abolishing the News Feed completely. That’s because the company correctly intuited a significant gap between its users stated preference — no News Feed — and their revealed preference, which was that they liked News Feed quite a bit. The next fifteen years would prove the company right.

It was hard to not think of that non-apology apology while watching Adam Mosseri’s Instagram update three weeks ago; Mosseri was clear that videos were going to be an ever great part of the Instagram experience, along with recommended posts. Zuckerberg reiterated the point on Facebook’s earnings call, noting that recommended posts in both Facebook and Instagram would continue to incre...