Instagram and Facebook Are Catching Up to TikTok: A Battle for Social Media Dominance

ByteDance’s short video application, TikTok, has surprised everyone with its exponential growth ever since it was released seven years ago, in 2016. With more then one billion users using the app every month, the site has found itself challenging other apps as well, including meta-owned Instagram and Facebook.

The video format of TikTok instantly beganattracting the younger generation. In order to counter the rising influence of the app, Meta introduced similar features under the name of reels on both of it’s apps, and as per the latest reports, the audiences of both sites have started to adopt reels as the user engagement figures started rising.

A survey was conducted two months ago, in which two thousand participants took part. Survey results showed that almost seventy-four percent of the Instagram audience started engaging with reels. At the end of the third quarter of 2022, the values were down at sixty-nine percent, whereas at the end of the first quarter of 2022, the figures were further down at around sixty-two percent.

On the other hand, almost sixty-five percent of the Facebook clients started to spend time on Facebook. These numbers were found to be around fifty-four percent last year in September and further down at forty-seven percent in March of the same year.

As compared to these two platforms, TikTok was unable to show any significant increase in user engagement. Last year, forty-seven percent of the participants engaged with the platform, whereas this year, the values were found to be around forty-nine percent.Not just Meta-owned platforms, but even Snapchat was able to take its user engagement figures all the way from forty-nine percent last year to sixty percent in the ongoing year.

According to Morgan Stanley, one of the research team members, with increasing monetization on these short videos by Meta, it can be expected that TikTok will face challenges as Meta-owned platforms continue their annual increment in profit.

The race for social media supremacy is heating up, with Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok each vying for users’ attention. While TikTok’s rapid ascent cannot be denied, Instagram’s and Facebook’s aggressive responses have started to pay off. Many creators who once solely focused on TikTok have expanded their presence to Instagram Reels and Facebook’s Reels.

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World