It is well known that TikTok represents a new form of social entertainment that’s extremely different from the one on Instagram, where you can just take a selfie, show something pretty or pan around what you’re up to.
Instagram’s users are concerned with portraying their lives in a fun and enticing way. But, the content is still autobiographic and spontaneous. On the other hand, TikToks are premeditated, storyboarded, mostly scripted and vastly different than the haphazard Stories on Instagram.
However, in one way or another, these two social media platforms have more than one thing in common. But, the main one is that they both are very popular. As a matter of fact, Instagram has over one billion monthly active users.
And Tiktok… Well, the name itself is starting to mean something to all of us social media users. Actually, the rise of influencers using Tiktok nowadays made us wonder. Could Tiktok pose a threat to Instagram? Let’s talk about that.
Tiktok vs Instagram – Statistics and Rivalry
TikTok’s success casts a dark shadow over the future of the Facebook family of apps, that include Instagram and Lasso. An app suspiciously similar to TikTok. The problem is Lasso has been installed just 425,000 times since it launched in November, while TikTok has 640 million installs in the same period outside of China.
But, there’s more. TikTok has actually been installed 1.4 billion times beyond China to date. Impressive, don’t you think? It’s Mark Zuckerberg’s pigeonholing of TikTok that is most alarming.
It foreshadows Facebook failing to win one of the core social feeds that its business depends on. Perhaps his perspective on the competitor is evolving, but the leak portrays him as thinking TikTok is just the next Snapchat Stories to destroy.
Mark Zuckerberg’s opinion
Facebook’s main creator has voiced his opinion on the current rivalry between the apps and how TikTok threatens to take over a big part of Instagram’s audience and users: “I kind of think about TikTok as if it were explored for stories, and that was the whole app.
And then you had creators who were specifically working on making that stuff. So we have a number of approaches that we’re going to take towards this, and we have a product called Lasso that’s a standalone app that we’re working on, trying to get product-market fit in countries like Mexico, is I think one of the first initial ones. We’re trying to first see if we can get it to work in countries where TikTok is not already big before we go and compete with TikTok in countries where they are big”.
In Zuckerberg’s credit, he does not dismiss the threat. He knows TikTok is popular, and he knows its userbase is growing exponentially every month. He also knows it’s growing in key international markets Facebook and Instagram depend on to keep user counts rising. And he knows his company needs to respond via its standalone clone Lasso and more.
Conclusion
To sum it up, TikTok isn’t about you or what you’re doing. It’s more about entertaining your audience. You see, unlike Instagram, Tiktok is not an app where you show those who follow you a spontaneous chronicling of your real life.
Instead, you invent characters, dress up as someone else and act out jokes. In short, what we are trying to say is that while Tiktok is different from Instagram in terms of content. Both apps share a huge base of users that open the apps on their phones every single day. Ergo, competition.
We will have to wait and see how this rivalry continues, and try to enjoy the updates on both apps that are consequences of both apps fighting to prove which one is better.
