Instagram announces 60-second Stories and may become a TikTok copycat

Rodrigo Martins

Nov 30, 21 | 8 min read
instagram stories 60 seconds
Reading time: 7 minutes
Instagram has become a kind of wild card for Facebook (oops, Meta; sorry, Zuckerberg!). The company could now consider the service as a TikTok killer. This is not something new. Instagram has also tried to “kill” Snapchat and YouTube in the past. Snapchat was hurt badly. But YouTube is stronger than ever today.

Now, Facebook (sorry, Meta!) is signaling that it will soon abandon one of its most famous “inspired” tools: stories. That was an idea that Snapchat first developed in the middle of the last decade and Zuckerberg’s company decided to include it in all its services without paying any royalties to the other organization.

Since 2016, like Snapchat, you can post 15-second

videos that disappear after 24 hours. Now, the company has confirmed that it will soon be possible to post 60-second videos on Stories , just like Reels, a feature that — let’s be honest — seems inspired by TikTok.

The news comes in the same quarter list of norfolk island consumer email that Instagram decided to close IGTV . Of course, as is tradition, the company that aims to make a “revolution” with its metaverse was not so original in this case. Does posting long videos not sound much like YouTube to you?

Fun fact: Before Instagram was acquired for $1 billion in 2012 , the company was already a giant and began developing a mobile app that would allow users to post photos with filters.

Does it remind you of anything?

Yes, in case of failure in the acquisition of Instagram, Facebook already had a “killer” for the real “killer” of everything that annoys Zuckerberg’s company. Facebook Camera was launched a month after the acquisition of Instagram and it is something that today almost no one remembers.

This aggressive strategy has turned the service that once featured food “pornography” and hipster-filtered pet photos into something more like Frankenstein. Not in those words, of course, but it’s something that even the company agrees with.

“We’ve made a lot of new bets [on the app] ,” Instagram boss Adam Mosseri told The Verge earlier this year. According to him, “most people” don’t know the difference between videos posted on Instagram and IGTV, for example. “We need to refocus on simplicity and craftsmanship.”

Back to simplicity
Until recently, for videos only, you had four ways to post on Instagram:

Feed;
Stories;
IGTV;
Reels.
All of these were “inspired” by some of its competitors’ resources. Photos, which were the core of the social app until the beginning, are still there, but they are not as important to the company as they used to be.

Mosseri said in June that the service is “no longer

a photo-sharing app” when explaining video plans: “Let’s be honest, there’s really serious competition right now. TikTok is huge, YouTube is even bigger, and there are a lot of other upstarts as well. People are looking to Instagram for entertainment, there’s tough competition, there’s more to do, and we have to embrace that.”

That will radically change Instagram, according 9 inbound marketing books you can’t miss! to media experts such as Social Media Today . Closing IGTV was the first step . Now, turning Stories into something very similar to Reels, which Mosseri said no longer made him “happy,” could serve only one purpose:

merge them to offer a simple tool for full-screen video and a near-endless source of entertainment content to scroll through. Like who? TikTok, of course.
Instagram has changed many times. Its logo, at first, was a Polaroid camera, for example. But when the product manager says that the main cg leads function of the app is no longer so important and talks specifically about TikTok (competing with YouTube, we already know, they failed), what do you expect to happen?