Snapchat vs Instagram: A diffusion threshold in the making?
The following article touches on the rise in popularity of Instagram’s upcoming story feature and how it has created new found competition for Snapchat, an app that seemingly was in a league of it’s own. The year after Instagram added their story feature, which allows users to post a photo or brief video that their followers can view for the next 24 hours before it disappears, Instagram released some stats that demonstrated a general trend of increased popularity. Users under the age of 25 spend on average around or more than 32 minutes a day on Instagram, which demonstrated that Instagram’s main demographic is comprised of younger individuals. The new feature also proved to be a success among businesses; considering that over half of businesses that used the social media platform platform have posted a story in the last month.
Users that are deciding between Instagram stories and Snapchat stories can potentially be described by a diffusion threshold model. If the percentage of a person’s friends were to switch to the Instagram stories rather than Snapchat, the user would definitely make the switch because this benefits them the most. This would explain why that if a social media app has more users in general, its popularity will grow at an exponential rate compared to what it would have been able to accomplish previously.
The use of Instagram stories can be described using some concepts about information cascades and diffusion thresholds we have learned in class. Considering Instagram has always had a large amount of users, even prior to introducing their stories, it was easy for the new feature to gain traction and initial users since the loyal followers would be excited to try out the feature. This is also fairly consistent with young people’s use of social media in general. When the story feature had some semblance of popularity, users could then decide whether they would participate and actually utilize the new feature that Instagram has offered. The two main reasons that were described in class for why people tend to follow the crowd is because of information based and direct benefit reasons. For example, information based reasoning in regards to utilizing Instagram’s stories is that potential users are able to concur that previous users have some information unknown to them, explaining why they have been using Instagram stories, so therefore this would lead them to using the feature. An example of direct benefit reason would be that users are more readily able to share their posts to a larger crowd of people, which they may have not been able to previously been able to accomplish. The large number of users of stories means that if a new user started to use stories to share information, it would reach a large amount of people compared to what they previously would have been able to share with.
Source:
http://fortune.com/2017/08/02/instagram-stories-snap/