Yahoo Finance 4 Ways Instagram Is Trying to Stay Relevant (FB)
Instagram, by many accounts, is a success story for Wall Street stalwart Facebook (FB).
The social network recently launched a Stories feature to rival Snapchat and will reportedly let users filter comments on their posts or even turn them off entirely. Better yet, the app just hit 1 billion downloads on Google Play, the 19th app to achieve this milestone.
Digital Trends points out the app only has half the amount of users, possibly a repeat install problem. But that's besides the point: Instagram has proven its prowess.
That said, the company isn't immune to problems nor looming concerns for its future relevance to its younger consumers. Here are four issues Instagram currently has to tackle.
We're not a regular app, we're a cool app. In order to keep up with its users, Instagram has a private Facebook group devoted to teens, called IG Young Artists, the Washington Post reports. Though Instagram boasts double the daily users of Snapchat, it's no secret that the concept behind Stories came from its rival.
To be fair, this group seems to be a way for Instagram to get ahead of potential problems. Discussions include tech concerns, polls, and apparently more in-depth feedback.
Who likes, who shares, who tells your story. Yes, Instagram Stories have arrived. The feature runs similar to Snapchat's, giving users the ability to post photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours.
The Wall Street Journal notes more rationale behind the move, citing an Piper Jaffray survey from April that examined American teens: Out of more than 6,530 teens, more than 28 percent called Snapchat their "top social network," compared to Instagram's 27 percent. This follows a poll from six months before that had Instagram at 33 percent and Snapchat at 19 percent.
But will Instagram Stories actually gain traction -- and will all its users understand the point? Bryan Clark on The Next Web writes, "Users that have never seen Snapchat are now posting vacation photos en masse, adding the occasional video of their drive to work and posting it on the platform as if it were compelling viewing. It's essentially Twitter when people used it to tell us what they were actually doing."
Scammergate. Scammers are obviously prevalent in the digital world, and Instagram is no exception. Accounts share pictures of "cash and other luxury goods," and later message followers "to cut [them] in on the deal," The Verge reports.
The scam, according to a ZeroFox report, occurred 4,574 individual times since 2013 on the app involving 1,386 accounts (meager compared to the sprawling 30 billion posts on Instagram and 2 million posts ZeroFox examined).
The researchers tracked accounts through a machine learning algorithm, and Instagram has a comparable strategy through its anti-fraud systems. Facebook was not able to see the report before its release, though a representative told The Verge, "This kind of activity is pretty low volume on Instagram." ZeroFox reported that 45 days following its first scan, just 20 percent of these scam posts were removed, followed by triple the amount of new scam uploads.
A light draft. In a move that would make users happy, Instagram started rolling out a "Save Draft" test, TechCrunch reported earlier this month.
This means users wouldn't lose edits if they clicked the "back" button on a post, and could save a draft. TechCrunch confirmed, however, this was just a test. Twitter (TWTR) users' overwhelmingly positive reactions to the possibility of this feature, though, could mean it has a future.
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