Many of the internet users of today would like to tarnish Instagram as a copycat, a thief or something which has completely ripped off someone else’s idea. Well, unfortunately with its new video feature, they can’t. Instagram wanted to be the ‘Instagram for video’ 14 months before Vine launched on twitter. It expressed its interest in “something bigger than filtered photos” as far back as November 2011.
Instagram offers a whole 15 seconds of video, nine more seconds than Vine offers. The CEO of Instagram, Kevin Systrom commented on the video length: “Fifteen seconds of video [is] the right balance between not-too-short that constrains your creativity and not-too-long where you end up having to wait a lot of time for something to download.”
Along with the extended video length Instagram video seems to have more features than Vine (see image below). However, Vine has had six months of community building and already has a huge following. Instagram will be looking to utilise their existing userbase of approximately 130 million people based around photographs to switch to the video format.
Image source: Techcrunch
People are already saying that the introduction of video to Instagram is a huge step forward for the company and will bring a lot more users to the application. Ovum analyst Eden Zoller was one of them, saying: “Mobile and video are going to be key to Facebook going forward. Launching video for Instagram is a logical next step. The only surprising thing is that it didn’t do it sooner.”
Mere hours after the Instagram video feature was implemented social media extraordinaire and occasional singer Justin Bieber hit over one million likes on a video post. The teen star was the first Instagram user to hit one million followers back in March 2012 after he joined the site in July 2011. He currently has more than nine million Instagram followers.
In the video Justin Bieber achieved the one million likes he is shown giggling, shirtless and informing his fans about Instagram’s new features. After posting the video he also tweeted it to his 40 million followers, again he was the first to reach that many followers.
I’d like to think that if Justin Bieber wasn’t a famous pop star he would be an incredible social media executive.
