Brand strategist Stanley Henry of The Attention Seeker considers the simple equation it seems TikTok forgot.
Instagram is dead! Zucks has killed Meta. These were the comments coming in everywhere in late 2021, after Mark announced Facebook would be renamed Meta. Its stock price plummeted and confidence in its ability to turn things around was waning. At the same time, TikTok was on a meteoric rise, gaining popularity in all areas of society and no longer just an app for young people to dance to.
Realising this was the future, companies like ours started doubling down into TikTok. Short-form, vertical video wasn’t going anywhere and we needed to capitalise on it. Every company on the planet was trying to figure out how to show up on TikTok and stopped looking at how they did the same on Instagram. For millennials, it was the hardest. Instagram was our app, we came of age on it and we were watching our old friend die.
Then, in mid to late 2023, something happened. It was hard to notice at first. You only saw it if you were trying to, so the casual onlooker wouldn’t, but the subtleness of it was the very reason it worked. Instagram didn’t make a huge fuss over it, they just sat back and watched it play out, as one by one, creators on Instagram were going viral and gaining followers at a rate unprecedented on any Meta platform before it.
The majority of them started with a simple trend: Day one of X for every new follower. The ‘X’ could be anything – at the beginning we saw things like walking one step, doing one push-up or running 1cm. This got Creative Producer at The Attention Seeker Jony Lee and I thinking about how we could do the same.
The next day, we went to work and came up with a strategy. Day one of counting one grain of rice for every new follower. The concept was that Jony would get 1 cent for every new follower, and to visualise it, she’d count a grain of rice. Fast forward 24 days and we went from 4,000 followers to 200,000. We were right, something was going on here. We’d amassed 15 million views in 24 days on a platform that in years gone by you’d have had to pay $150,000 to get the same reach on.
The more we looked into this, the more we realised our own Instagram accounts’ explore pages and reels tabs were serving us content we actually want to consume – that we were being entertained. But I wasn’t limited to short-form video. I could go on my explore page and be shown interesting and entertaining carousel posts. Static posts were back? Wait, what? When? How?
As marketers, we’d been told for years that static posts were dying and brands were actively asking their social agencies to stop making them and focus on video. Instagram showed us all that wasn’t true anymore.
So it’s 2024 – where are we and how is Instagram faring? Well, its stock price has increased by 550 percent since hitting rock bottom in 2022. People are still growing their accounts exponentially and going viral like it’s TikTok 2020. More importantly, TikTok is having an identity crisis. In its quest to be everything to everyone, it’s made changes to its platform that have its biggest fans questioning if it can still deliver what they came there for – entertaining videos.
There’s a simple equation here that Instagram has finally realised, and one TikTok’s forgetting. Attention goes where the best content is, and the best content goes where it’s most valuable. The most valuable currency in our world is attention, so if I can get more predictable virality on Instagram, I’m taking my content there.
If I were a brand today, I’d be hedging my bets and playing them both, but if Instagram is your preferred platform, then just know it’s back. It’s changed, though – the same content that worked four years ago doesn’t work now.
Get onto your explore page and start consuming what’s going viral – and just to throw a spanner in the works, don’t forget that both Facebook and YouTube have larger audiences than Instagram and TikTok, with all the same mechanisms and short-form video capabilities.
This was first published in our March/April issue.
