How diffusion of innovations made TikTok more popular than Instagram?
When speaking about TikTok, the app that has been available the users since 2018, most of us have not really heard about TikTok prior to 2019 and some people even later. We have not considering using the app since this year and we all thought that Instagram offers more to the users and that is the reason why we spend more time. But is this true? Let us look at the article recently published and how the numbers of downloads compare between those two popular social media applications.
According to the article, Instagram still in the number of users and all-time downloads. However, this is not the area we will focus on. Perhaps, the trend that we could see in the last two years when TikTok really became popular, is worrying for Instagram. During each quarter in 2019, TikTok has almost doubled the number of downloads that Instagram has. In addition to that, 49% of all-time downloads of TikTok came in 2019, whereas when we speak about Instagram, only 28% of its all-time downloads came from 2019. Continuing with the numbers in 2020, this article suggests that during the first quarter only of this year, TikTok managed to receive almost triple the number of downloads that Instagram had. When only seeing the numbers, one can say that Instagram has been on the market longer, and therefore most of the people already have the app and can not download it again. However, another article suggests that this might not be the case.
According to the other article, which analyses the data about time spent on Instagram and TikTok, TikTok has recently seen an increase in engagement from users. In 2020, the app has experienced a rise from 37 to 41 minutes per day of engagement by its’ users. Contrary to that, Instagram only registered 33 minutes of engagement per year, which is only a rise of a minute from the previous year. From those two articles, we can conclude that users not only download TikTok more but are also slowly shifting their attention from Instagram to TikTok. But what is the reason behind this decision? In this paper, I will explain why the diffusion of innovations does, as well as clusters, play a huge role in this decision.
The reason behind this enormous growth of downloads, as well as the rise of time spent on TikTok, could be explained by diffusion. From what we have seen in class when people within a network see that most of their friends, or at least more than half of them, switched the technology they are using, then they are going to switch to. In other words, if more than half of the friends of one person in the network switch to TikTok from Instagram, they will switch too. This explains the growth of TikTok recently. Although such diffusions start when only a few users switch to the new technology, over time it grows more and more. This is how the change of technology then appears overtime over larger networks and eventually goes to another network of people as well.
From what I have experienced personally, most of the people that I interact with and networks that I am part of have not used TikTok before this year. We have all been using Instagram and other apps. However, a couple of my close friends have downloaded TikTok at the beginning of the year. Since those friends are really close to me and together we are part of a small network with a few people, I have decided to download the app. I haven’t spent much time on it, but because my friends have switched technologies and decided to download TikTok and see what it offers differently compared to Instagram, I did that as well. Then, my other friends have downloaded TikTok as well since I did it and the networks of people that downloaded this app became bigger and bigger. From this, we could see how the number of downloads is growing simply because of the diffusion of innovations within certain networks. Later those networks become larger and larger and consequently more and more people download the new application.
When speaking about minutes spent on TikTok, the same explanation stands. When I at first saw that my friends downloaded the app, I have done that too. But later, I saw that most of my close friends spend more and more time on it, so I decided to do that as well. This resulted in me almost completely switching the technologies and spending more time on TikTok than on Instagram. The result of it is not because I like TikTok’s features more, but simply because more of my friends started using it. The switch of technologies both in terms of downloads and later in time spent on the app that occurred in the networks I am part of, resulted in my switch as well.
From the experiences I had, it is logical why TikTok has recently taken over Instagram both in terms of downloads and engagement from the users. Different people switch over time from one technology to another and later many networks adopt new technologies. This explains why the diffusion of innovations plays a major part in TikTok’s recent growth.