Instagram announced Stories last August. It’s an exacting implementation of Snapchat Stories, one of the headline features of the still-young messaging app popular with teenage users. Photos and videos added to Stories are viewed in a carousel by your followers. They disappear from the app after 24 hours.
Immediately after its launch, Stories was credited with slowing the pace of Snapchat’s growth. Back in January, Instagram announced 150 million people were using the feature each day. Today, it updated the figure, revealing over 200 million users post to Stories each month.
In comparison, Snapchat has a grand total of 161 million active users. Instagram has almost 25 percent more users frequenting Stories alone. It has over 600 million registered accounts though as many people continue to use the app without getting involved in Stories.
In an attempt to convince these users to give the concept a try, Instagram today announced a fresh set of Stories features. Predictably, the “new” tools are really just clones of existing Snapchat functions.
You can now create your own stickers to pin to your story, overlaying a selfie on a photo or video. Multiple items can be pinned to a single post and it’s possible to choose between a selection of different frame styles.
Instagram is also expanding geostickers to include four new cities. Geostickers are specially designed stickers that only appear when you’re in the location they represent. They’re slowly rolling out around the world as Instagram sources artwork to illustrate them. It’s relying on local community members to create the vibrant imagery.
As Instagram Stories rises to comfortably surpass Snapchat, the company’s newly formed parent company Snap will be feeling the pressure. Since filing its IPO in March, it has failed to retain its opening price and investors are concerned about its rapid deceleration in user growth.
Facebook’s strategy of shoehorning Stories into all of its major properties seems to be paying off, demonstrating it still controls social media even if it has replaced innovation with highly derivative copying.
Snapchat will make its first earnings call early next month. The figures it produces are likely to have a significant impact on how investors approach the company’s future.
If its growth continues to head towards a flat line, the app could see further reductions in its stock pricing. The company dipped another 1.25% today on the news of Instagram’s unprecedented success with Stories. It had already fallen earlier in the week when Instagram rolled out ephemeral messages to its “Direct” feature.
While Snap is viewed as the upstart in Silicon Valley, it’s clear it’s no longer able to forge its own path forward without being impacted by the other social networking giants. Instagram is impacting the company’s business and it’s possible Facebook’s other “Stories” implementations will make similar strides forward this year.
