Tik Tok, as we know, is the king of video marketing with the app’s focus on short-form video content that people can produce. Tik Tok has 1.5 billion downloads between the App store and the Google store. With video marketing being the way to advertise your products or services, Tik Tok and Instagram both want to take advantage of this new trend. According to the director of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, Instagram plans to focus more on video and less on pictures. They see it as an opportunity to cater to young adults who typically like video content more than pictures. Let’s start by going over Tik Tok and why their formula is working so well.
Tik Tok started to become a big hit in early 2019 and now it’s one of the most popular video formats for advertising your product or service. Being a short-form video, it could easily catch someone’s attention than watching a long-form video. The combination of Influencers, short-form video and music is the perfect recipe for getting the statistics you want for your marketing efforts. The only element which may discourage people from using Tik Tok is the editing that needs to be completed to make an effective video. With digital marketing, it will take time to edit your video with your product to make an engaging format that could potentially go viral. If you know how to create a Tik Tok video and your product or service works well with the app, there’s no question you should be using it. Now let’s focus on Instagram and why they want to move on from pictures and focus on videos like Tik Tok.
Instagram’s goal, from its inception, was to focus on the ability to take pictures to get engagement on your content. Like every other social media platform, they realized that video should be the focus so brands can get the attention they want. In the past few months, media outlets have come out with news that Instagram wants to move on from pictures to short-form videos. The competition between Instagram and Tik Tok has never been at this level before, with both companies pushing towards the same goal. Adam Mosseri added, “We’re also going to experiment with embracing video more broadly – full-screen video, immersive, entertaining, for mobile devices,” he explained. “You will see us do a number of things or experiment with various things in this space over the next few months.” It’s going to be fascinating to see their transition from pictures to video, considering pictures have been a staple of their company from the very start. If you want to know how a short-form video might work for your business, click on the middle icon at the bottom of the app. This function is called the reel video function, which is the equivalent of Tik Tok for Instagram. It’s still to be seen how effective this could be for businesses to help promote their product or service. I see that this change of mindset from Instagram could be a positive step for them to stray away from pictures. Since an image might not catch the full value of a product or explaining a service, I feel that more companies will sway toward using Instagram reels in the future.
It will be interesting to see the development of reel videos on Instagram and how people use them for their businesses in the coming months. It’s to be seen if Twitter wants to jump on the short video platform also and now YouTube is in its beta to see if it’s worth pursuing. We can now say that the short video platform is here to stay and will continue to be a crucial part of digital marketing.