Instagram's mood change
What the recent big changes tell us about its product strategy
Welcome! This week we explore Instagram’s seemingly small but potentially big product moves. If you are new here and are looking for recommendations, you’ll like this article on Edtech and this one on Social Commerce. Cheers!
A couple of days back, I opened Instagram and saw Suggested Posts. About two weeks back, I’d seen another change, Reels. Is Instagram changing its product strategy? If so, why? It is not simply the Tiktok zeitgeist.
From filters to Facebook
Instagram started out as Burbn, another location check-in app in a crowded market, by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. It quickly pivoted to a photo filter app, enabling photo sharing with the use of its filters. Within two months, it had 1 Mn registered users.
Consumer social apps grow viral due to a variety of reasons. Three things worked for Instagram initially
- the filters that it added
- it being a public network
- mobile-first
iPhone was already a popular smartphone by then, in its 4th edition. With its industry-beating camera, the mobile photo culture was also catching up. And filters were a way to make the captured memories more attractive and also personalised.
Facebook had become chaotic, a mix of text and images from your friends. And it was also a private network, which meant that it relied heavily on social graph. Unlike Facebook, Instagram was not limited by friend graph. Friends make it mandatory for both users to engage with each other in feed (part of the reason LinkedIn feed sucks), however, one-way follows give users more control over their feed. This is especially useful for top creators who want followers en masse but don’t want to follow as many people.
Centered on these levers, with some influencer push, Instagram achieved strong growth initially.
In 2012, the marriage with Facebook happened, genesis of which was this email thread. As expected with Facebook’s reputation of squeezing every revenue from ads, Instagram started ads the next year, 2013, growing to a behemoth of $20 Bn revenue in 2019. However, advertising wasn’t the only gene it inherited from its parent. The copying culture too came.
Stories & the decline of posts
In 2016, Instagram launched Stories, as rip-off of Snapchat. Since then, stories have become a crucial engagement media within Instagram.
The launch and success of Stories is a part of a larger trend of ephemerality. The permanent nature of posts, combined with the social pressure to share only ‘cool’ stuff meant that users posted items only when they were perfect, making it a frictional affair. Stories allowed users to be more casual, low-risk and by extension, making creation frictionless.
Where else have we seen this trend recently? Painful long video creation at Youtube giving way to easy 20s videos on TikTok.
Stories’ explosive growth meant that posts started becoming less relevant, at least to normal users. Users have two ways to interact with posts, Home page and Explore. Home page is a feed based on the following list, spluttered with some ads and Explore.
Explore mishaps
Explore is supposed to solve two purposes for the user
- Show what the user will like outside of the follow feed
- Help user find things/people they are specifically looking for (E.g. search)
It is the first purpose that Instagram does not do a great job at solving. Instagram Explore is a hotchpotch of all things. It typically has a slightly larger IGTV video and some posts surrounding it.
1) The UI puts the onus of decision on the user among 10 choices, adding cognitive overload, and that is just on the first page. You scroll and you are bombarded even more. Products like Twitter do a good job here of limiting the items of the main trends.
2) Those ten choices say little about the content. The one-click preview helps but categorization would be even better (e.g. travel, celebrity etc)
3) Why are only those choices there? Is it based on the most trending across all users? Or is it based on personalization based on users’ engagement history? I’ve observed it to be a bit of both, but neither fully, and that solves nothing. Tiktok solved it uniquely – it broke down these two into Home feed (starting with trending and getting personalized over time) and Explore (which had all the trending #hashtags/challenges).
Feed bumps
If you categorize social networks into three buckets, the innermost depicts have friends or connections (essentially two-way follows). The next layer, has one-way follows. The next, no social graph.
The Home page feed of IG is good, but not good enough. Here’s why. Reliance on social graph restricts the domain of content user can interact with in the Home Feed. Instagram wants to move to the bottommost layer, then it can show whatever it wants (regardless of user’s follow preferences).
Suggested posts breaks through the social graph barrier and removes onus on Explore at the same time. Does this break experience for the user? A bit, that’s why right not they are shown after user goes through the follow feed. Other way of showing this is having a separate tab (Following and Suggested), which I think Instagram will converge towards.
Suggested posts is not the only major change, another crucial direction for Instagram is Reels.
Rolling on Reels
FB started taking the Tiktok threat seriously and launched Reels in Brazil in November last year It launched worldwide on Aug 5.
With TikTok getting banned in major countries (US, India), a lot of influencers from there flocked to Instagram, because of its existing distribution and similar positioning. However, the native content of Instagram is not hinged on short-video only. And Reels can fill this gap for the creators.
The choice of keeping it in the same app is interesting. It is obviously a move to leverage existing distribution. It’s UI also changes the hijacks the Explore section, leveraging the video behavior already seen in Explore. However, considering the problems with Explore, my sense is Reels might be pushed even further to get more attention from the user. But for now, it is a good experiment with low downsides.
Reels is likely to copy the TikTok playbook, work closely with top influencers, provide fun creation tools and rely on algorithms solely on deciding which content to show to the users.
Combine suggested posts and Reels, and you see IG is moving on the algorithm path, not just for short video but even for some traditional content, betting that this will conquer its current invisible asymptote. Will that actually solve its existing troubles with the product? Or will it just add to the mishmash?
* - Tiktok has a following feed but it is not the major feed (For You is more dominant)
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