21 Days Later, Instagram Stories reviewed

By Siobhan Scanlon

21 Days Later…

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock you’ll know that earlier this month Instagram threw an almighty curveball in the direction of Snapchat with the launch of Instagram Stories. They completely ripped off Snapchats functionality  but simplified and improved it making it possible for even the tech dinosaurs amongst us to take a stab at  this ever popular way of storytelling on digital media. And since launching Instagram have been a little cloak and danger about its success but there are some trends emerging and Instagram detective Iconosquare have just released some interesting stats that outline changes in behaviour since its launch 21 days ago.

Instagram is famed for it’s high engagment. Since day one engagement on Instagram has been considerably higher than Facebook and Twitter. In fact it’s 58 times higher than its mother, Facebook. Since stories launched they asked over 1,000 Instagram users what they spend most of their time doing on the platfrom  and the result were pretty telling. Three quarters of those surveyed said they spend the majority of their time browsing their feed with the remaining quarter saying they spend more time watching stories than anything else. Which is pretty unbelievable when you think that Stories launched just three weeks ago. And even more so when you look at the bigger picture, that being that 25% or close to 100 million people every month are predominantly watching stories on the platform based on the recent research.

On top of this it seems that this sudden shift in behaviour  has impacted behaviour on traditional posts. In the 4 weeks prior to launching and 3 weeks post, they reviewed the engagement evolution of 60 top brands on the platform , 30 of whom began using Stories and 30 who rarely or never tried the new feature. Reports show that engagement on traditional posts of those brands using stories dropped from 1.11% to 0.94%, that’s a drop, that’s around 15% with it expected to fall further as more and more people embrace the stories feature. But on the flip side they checked out how many traditional pictures were being uploaded to the platform and there was no change in the volume of daily posts.

So in summary, Stories has seen great success in it’s short life and whether or not it’s to the detriment of Instagrams traditional way of posting remains to be seen. In three week there can be no real perspective on the matter so it’s too hard to call anything just yet.

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