Users value simplicity.

 

Shenzhen Translation Bureau is its compilation team, focusing on the fields of technology, business, workplace, life, etc., focusing on introducing new technologies, new ideas, and new trends abroad.

Editor’s note: Affected by the epidemic, residents in many parts of the world are restricted from going out. The amount of time people stay at home has suddenly increased. Changes in lifestyle have also led to changes in entertainment methods. TikTok is one of them. Some people assert that the rise of TikTok has affected the business of Instagram and YouTube. How exactly? See what this article says. Article translated from Medium, author Aaron Dinin, original title TikTok Can Coexist with Instagram, but It ’s Going to Destroy YouTube.

Image source: Unsplash

In the week after the in-situ isolation order was issued because of the epidemic, a student in my social marketing class made the following assertion:

 

Instagram is now dead, because no one is doing something cool, and there are no good photos to post. TikTok is at the core of the problem. “

As a person who studies and teaches social media, I think I am more concerned about the rise of TikTok than most middle-aged men. I have guessed that the epidemic will have a huge impact on the development of the platform, and my student’s speech reflects this speculation. However, linking TikTok’s growth to the demise of Instagram may not be accurate. On the surface, yes, Instagram and TikTok are both APP-based social media platforms, and users can swipe the screen to browse short and interesting content made by others. But these similarities are only superficial. The core functions of TikTok and Instagram are actually different.

The huge difference between TikTok and Instagram

To explain the fundamental difference between TikTok and Instagram, let’s take a closer look at what my students said. She is a twenty-year-oldOf her students, her Instagram is full of what other young people in their twenties are doing. For her, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the number of pictures worth taking due to the epidemic has temporarily declined. But this explains more of her own social network status than the platform itself.

In contrast, look at my use of Instagram. As a parent in his thirties, with two young children, my Instagram account has been filled with photos of their children posted by friends a long time ago. Because the epidemic has given my peers more time with their children, they also have more new content to share than before.

In other words, during the outbreak, my students and I had different experiences on Instagram. In any case, our experience reminds us that Instagram ’s core connection mode, the basic mode of how users connect to each other, is encouraging users to follow their personally selected crowd activities.

But this is not TikTok’s connection mode. For those who have not spent much time comparing TikTok and Instagram connection models (most people are not my nerds who study social media), the reality is that TikTok does not emphasize paying attention to others. Yes, TikTok does allow users to follow others. And indeed, many users are paying attention to the accounts of others. However, based on TikTok’s content selection algorithm, users can have a fully immersive TikTok experience without paying attention to other accounts.

To fully appreciate the differences, you can recall the moment you created your Instagram account. The first thing you are asked to do is choose another account to follow. Without this step, you may not get any value from Instagram, nor will you become an active user.

These different connection modes mean that Instagram and TikTok provide different types of value. Instagram primarily provides value to users by allowing them to continue to “follow” the lives of others they care about. In contrast, TikTok provides users with value by displaying entertaining content, and the relationship between users and content creators is secondary.

What social platforms will TikTok replace?

Returning to my student ’s comment that Instagram is dead, she never said that the value she got from Instagram was being replaced by TikTok, but lamented that the value she got from Instagram was no longer so easy to obtain during the epidemic, and TikTok It seems more useful at this moment because it is providing value in a different way.

If there is any difference, thenThe fact that the epidemic caused a surge in TikTok users highlights the difference between the two platforms. If Instagram and TikTok play the same role in the lives of users, then both platforms will also be affected by the epidemic, but they do not. On the contrary, TikTok is booming, and for some user groups, Instagram usage may decline slightly.

We should even doubt this statement. How much of the surge in TikTok could be the unexpected result of some people having more time to use social media? Perhaps there is as much content on Instagram as before, but its users have more time during the epidemic and can “swipe to the end” more frequently?

For these reasons, I do n’t think Instagram needs to worry too much about TikTok ’s erosion of its market share. However, I did see that TikTok’s counterattack threatened another platform: YouTube.

Why YouTube ca n’t compete with TikTok

Although YouTube, like TikTok, allows users to follow other accounts (“subscribe” in YouTube’s parlance), most YouTube users do not subscribe to many accounts. On the contrary, like TikTok users, YouTube users seem not to care much about who they are watching, but more about the happiness and / or information they get from watching. This similar usage pattern shows that users get similar value from TikTok and YouTube. However, TikTok has a big advantage: time constraints. TikTok’s video playback time does not exceed 60 seconds.

Spend an hour on TikTok and then an hour on YouTube, and you will soon feel the difference. On TikTok, an hour passes by fast. You keep jumping from one video to the next. Each video is perfectly managed by an algorithm that seems to know you better than you. On YouTube, you may only watch five to six videos in the same hour. In addition, you may spend part of your time on some boring videos, and these videos will not let your interest stay in the first few minutes.

After comparing the two platforms, you will start to see the key issue with YouTube videos: they are too “bloated.” The “culprit” is not Vlog, TED speeches and online dramas, because most people are willing to spend more time watching content with fascinating story lines. Instead, the real “bloated” content on YouTube appears in videos like “How To …”.

Content that teaches people how to do things (from in PhotosEditing pictures in hops to cooking new dishes, and then repairing leaky faucets) often takes much longer than it actually needs, because YouTube videos can last 15 minutes (in some cases, up to 12 hours). This longer time limit makes each video have less thoughtful editing and more insignificant “moisture”.

For example, suppose you want to repair a door that rubs against the top of the door frame. Since 2008, 1.4 million people have skipped seven and a half minutes of video tutorials. In contrast, in just two months on TikTok, 3.2 million people learned the same thing in less than 60 seconds. And just as importantly, many people are unaware that they need to know this information, but TikTok’s algorithm does not think so.

Let ’s declare that my wife is one of the 3.2 million people. She forwarded the content on TikTok to me so that I can watch this video to repair the door of our house. TikTok, thank you for ruining my half day on Sunday.

In a way, the relationship between the “How …” video on YouTube and the “How …” video on TikTok reminds me of Mark Twain (controversial ) Old saying:

 

I apologize for such a long channel. I don’t have time to write a short article. “

Twain reminds us that it is actually easier to make a long speech than to express it concisely, because it is more difficult to process our ideas than to record them. But users value simplicity. TikTok will force this, but YouTube does not. Unless YouTube changes soon, I doubt we will start to see more “how …” videos on TikTok. As the collection of “how” videos on TikTok grows, it will eventually drive user growth more than the epidemic, and the social media platform most affected by the TikTok counterattack will not be Instagram.

Translator: Yoyo_J