26 Aug What are the differences between Instagram Stories and Snapchat?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, then you’re quite aware of the rising social giants Instagram and Snapchat. These photo-sharing apps have managed to successfully differentiate themselves to the consumer by delivering photos and video in attractive formats that don’t exchange market share.
Snapchat vs Instagram
Snapchat, for example, is predicated on the how fleeting human interaction can be. You take video of yourself doing something and send it to followers and friends; however, analytics show that videos longer than about 10 seconds didn’t resonate as well with audiences as well as shorter videos. You can certainly send stand-alone images on Snapchat; the running “gimmick” of the site is that once the content you send out to friends and followers is viewed, it is deleted forever. The duration of the experience is just ten seconds, and successful marketers and self-promoters are the ones who use this time limit as a guideline to fashioning the content they want to deliver.
It gives you an opportunity to maximize a message by keeping it short and sweet, and benefitting your brand from the engagement. Snapchat is the definition of rapid media consumption – it takes advantage of short attention span in a world where there’s so much to see and do.
Instagram, on the other hand, is considerably more photo-friendly. Although you can post short videos on your Instagram page; the huge array of in-built camera filters and photo editing tools makes it clear that the site is image-driven. As a subsidiary of the king of all social media, Facebook, success is predicated on the highest-quality pictures – and of course, on content. People find you via the hashtags you put on the photos you take, which increases engagement beyond your circle of followers.
Telling Stories on Social Platforms
The above suggest to you how either platform can be best utilized for storytelling. On Instagram, because of the large photo-space available, storytelling can arguably be more dynamic. You can splice video in; and day-by-day or week-by-week add content to a new grid and use similar hashtags to help newcomers find your ongoing Instagram story. It’s a little more amenable to chapter format than Snapchat – just make sure you also use tags that include a link to pervious chapters. Your followers will be notified every time you post, so they don’t need the link-backs, but any new readers will need direction.
Snapchat, on the other hand, quickly deletes content that has been viewed, so stories have to be constructed with a ten-second time limit in mind. Viewers cannot go back and view previous chapters, which means you have to be creative – perhaps provide a link to a separate personal website where they can view past episodes. Alternatively, you could also tell a rapid-fire short story by making several videos and firing them of one after the other during a time of peak engagement. Both Instagram and Snapchat have their benefits for social media; leveraging both would be a boon to your business.
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