Instagram vs Snapchat – Battle of the Stories
Mirror Mirror on the Wall, who’s the best storyteller of them all?
Earlier this morning, Instagram announced the newest feature it will be rolling out to the social media platform – Instagram Stories. Now, this sounds seemingly familiar as it seems Instagram has taken a few pages, or chapters, from Snapchat’s book.
The additional features to Instagram’s platform will include the ability to share moments out of your day, including the components of adding text and drawing directly on Stories’ pictures and videos. Images will disappear after 24 hours on Stories and can be viewed through clicking on the accounts profile picture. Following the privacy settings of your account, users will be able to see who has viewed their story and restrict certain users should they want to.
The positive aspects of Instagram Stories? You can interact and engage with your Instagram followers more without them having to leave the app, open Snapchat and see what you’re up to. Users will be able to view Stories from accounts they follow and their favourite business accounts as well.
One of our accounts luckily had the feature implemented so we were able to play around with it first-hand. Very easy to get used to since the interface is pretty much an exact replica of Snapchat. Users can take a picture using the front or back camera and draw, add text or include emojis. If you swipe from the top down, you’ll be able to upload any pictures on your Camera Roll from the past 24 hours. Unfortunately, there are no fun filters to play with like Snapchat (yet?) Another first-hand test was experimenting with viewing our story from another profile – those accounts that don’t have the story feature currently rolled out on it yet won’t be able to view accounts that do. The Story feature can be accessed through the timeline of your Instagram profile, with a colourful circle encompassing your profile picture for users to view.
Since Snapchat has been a game changer in the social media world in terms of the features it continues to implement as well as the consistent engagement levels for its user base, we don’t see this medium becoming obsolete any time soon. Snapchat’s ability to capture the “real life” component and allow users to witness the daily lives of their friends and favourite accounts Part of the reason why Snapchat is enjoyable for users is the continuously changing filters, the chat (both text and voice) for users to send directly to their friends and custom geofilters to name a few. Not to say that Instagram can’t keep up with Snapchat’s evolving features, but it will take time for users to get used to.
What’s a world without the dog filter anyways?
