The pandemic hit in 2020 and the whole world was shut down (literally); everyone was told to stay home and not come out. Naturally, everyone ran to the big social media platforms Instagram, Youtube, Snapchat, Twitter etc to get their social connectivity fix. Then suddenly there was this rise of short, snappy quick videos trending everywhere online. Everything from quick DIY tutorials, dancing trends, pet tricks and beauty hacks were being made by content creators. The desire for short videos rose and not too long after, Instagram rolled out their “TikTok” equivalent called Reels. However, In my (humble) opinion TikTok is so much better; the ‘For You Page’ (FYP) is literally curated to match what you like. The algorithm works really well and so in my feed, I see more of the things I want to see rather than ads, ads, ads like (cough) Instagram.
Is Instagram going down? What about Twitter?
A lot of content creators have been complaining about Instagram; actually they have been complaining for years now but it seems as though Instagram is not listening. The first annoyance is that Instagram does not show your content to all your followers, which means you can potentially miss out on engagement because some followers just haven’t seen your content. I suspect they do this to encourage people to pay for ads space to boost their views. However, this might actually work against them as people move more and more away from Instagram. Other complaints that have been said over the years include, the feed not being in chronological order, the redesign of the app (seems to be congested) and too many ads are shown in the feed. All these issues are not prevalent in TikTok and so it’s understandable why many creators have started to do more of their ‘creating’ on TikTok.
But wait, what about Twitter?
Oh yes Twitter, the land for the non-faint hearted. Personally from what I can see, it looks like the desire to tweet has not gone down at all; if anything more people are using this more, specially to express their annoyance with the way many governmental bodies are handling the pandemic. Although Twitter and Instagram are both large social media platforms, they both have very different purposes & usage; many people use Instagram for visuals and for the aesthetics whilst Twitter is mainly used for dialogue most specially to express opinions (in other words – for ranting). So based on this, it’s difficult to compare the two – however it does further highlight why many people are moving to TikTok as it is also a visual platform, which allows for content creators to still create content that are visual but also allows them to be very creative
Surely not Youtube? Not my beloved Youtube.
Now, I love Youtube – I’m almost borderline an addict. Over the last year and at the beginning of 2021, a lot of Youtube content creators have said how they have lost the desire to create Youtube videos. Many have said this is because the work involved to create a good Youtube video does not translate to a good monetary return compared to (yep you guessed it) TikTok. It doesn’t take too much effort to create a 30secs – 1 min TikTok video that goes viral compared to a 20-30mins Youtube video and so many are diverting their energy where they are kind of guaranteed a higher return. To be quite honest – I don’t blame content creators; we live in a time where people want to learn things in a quick video as the attention span of many people is not long. So what will happen to Youtube? Probably nothing, however if Google can create a way that can inspire content creators to be more creative then, many content creators will invest more time on that platform.
Overall, it looks like TikTok will continue rising as it’s demand increases. Over time, I believe more social media platforms will be created, providing more outlets for people to be more creative so I guess the final words should be ‘watch this space’.