Picture Instagram as a video-centric platform. Some can’t, others won’t, but with TikTok breathing down its neck at a delicate time, expect changes to how users engage. And that will have broad implications for Meta’s efforts to monetize the platform and compete more broadly for social commerce dollars.
On Tuesday (July 26), the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, had some answers for a growing group of IG activists who feel a shift to video shorts and away from the images that made the site popular with younger users will harm the experience.
With heavy hitters including Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian posting quips like “Stop trying to be TikTok I just want to see cute photos of my friends” and touting a Change.org petition called “Make Instagram Instagram Again,” Mosseri used … Twitter to address the imbroglio.
In a video Tweet on Tuesday, Mosseri pointed to concerns from users “users who feel that Instagram Reels — the video feature introduced in 2020 — is slowly overtaking the platform, among other complaints, including some discontent around the Recommendations feature that some feel is increasingly irrelevant to them — the opposite of its intent.
“I want to be clear. We’re going to continue to support photos. It’s part of our heritage. I love photos. I know a lot of you out there love photos too,” Mosseri said, addressing the issue of IG Reels versus static images. “That said, I need to be honest. I do believe that more and more of Instagram is going to become video over time. We see this even if we change nothing.”
He said this is an effect of more users creating and sharing Reels across the IG and Facebook platforms, where Reels can be shared interchangeably.
“If you look at what people like and consume and view on Instagram, that’s also shifting more and more to video over time,” he said. “So, we’re going to have to lean into that shift while continuing to support photos.”
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IG parent Meta has been pushing video hard — especially since it debuted Reels on Facebook in 2021. On Tuesday, Variety reported that “Meta, having seen intensified competition from TikTok for share of time, has scurried to pump more video features into Instagram. Instagram Reels represents more than 20% of time spent on the app, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told analysts in April. But it’s still early days in terms of generating revenue from that short-form video consumption, according to Meta.”
Even as TikTok abandoned plans for live-stream selling outside of Asia due to disappointing performance in the U.K., another image-centric site, Pinterest, has been busy making that platform more shoppable, although not relying heavily on short-form video to do so.
Pinterest Senior Vice President and Head of Engineering Jeremy King told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster that with the platform’s new canonical catalog and Shop Tab feature, “we have a good baseline set up for a shopping ecosystem.” Pinterest introduced Video Pins in 2017 as a means for brands to promote products, with regular Pinners primarily sticking with images. For now.
As for IG Reels and video generally, Mosseri said, “we’re going to stay committed to supporting photos, we’re going to stay in a place where we try and put your friend’s content at the top of feed and the front of stories whenever possible. But we’re also going to need to evolve because the world is changing quickly, and we’re going to have to change along with it.”
See also: Pinterest’s Jeremy King on Getting Serious About Converting Inspiration to Sales
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