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For many years, Instagram has dominated the online commerce market. In the decade since then-Facebook, now-Meta Platforms, Inc., acquired Instagram, its value has soared by nearly 100-fold. Last year, Instagram easily outmatched the combined revenues of many other platforms such as LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Twitter combined.
With nearly five billion social media accounts interconnecting the world and Facebook’s clear dominance in the market, one might consider it a given that Instagram will maintain its dominance as the preferred online advertising location for years to come. But recent research by CouponBirds, shows that may not be the case.
A New Challenger on the Horizon
ByteDance changed the landscape with the launch of TikTok — a global version of the Douyin app created for the Chinese market — five years ago. Although they operate on similar platforms, the content does not cross between Douyin and TikTok.
Since 2017, TikTok has gained immense popularity by building upon something Twitter had tried and later abandoned. Between 2013 and 2017, Vine offered the Twitterverse a way to share short video loops. Although the number of Vine users approached 200 million by late 2015, Twitter let this initiative rot on the vine by early 2017 and discontinued its archive in 2019, largely because the company never found a way to grow money from the Vines of that digital tree.
TikTok picked up the beat. Through masterful algorithms and mind-catching content, no-names with smartphones found new ways of becoming powerful social media influencers. TikTok quickly attracted the interest of an up-and-coming demographic: Tweens, teens, and the young-of-heart of all ages enjoyed the mesmerizing, almost addictive nature of the eye candy from short TikTok videos.
Other platforms have responded, trying to increase their numbers and potential influence similar to TikTok. Snapchat launched Spotlight in November 2020. YouTube Shorts celebrated a global release of its area for brief video snippets in July 2021. By the end of 2021, however, TikTok had reached a new and powerful summit. The web performance and security company Cloudfare proclaimed that TikTok had become the most popular global website, pushing Google and others from the top.
New Pressures Influence the E-Commerce Landscape
During the past year, some Instagrammers with five-figure followings have been asked to post strategically, use hashtags freely, and kick up more digital dust to generate greater traffic through the use of Instagram Reels.
Meta hoped the already-popular influencers on Instagram would choose Reels over TikTok. Piloted in late 2019 and launched widely in August 2020, Instagram Reels offered what Meta hoped would be a real way to stifle TikTok’s growing market share. Full-screen ads began appearing on Reels in June 2021.
However, recent research from CouponBirds, a top website in the coupon industry that tracks trends in e-commerce, clearly reveals that, despite its dominance in recent years, Instagram no longer serves as the top choice of merchants.
What does this mean for the future of Instagram influencers? It’s too soon to tell, but it will be interesting to see which social platform will reign king as we move closer to the end of 2022. It’s a trend worth watching.
