The latest announcement from Instagram, which was bought by Facebook last year for a cool $1 billion, is that it now has video capabilities. Instagram’s Co-Founder and CEO Kevin Systrom said that Instagram will now allow users to create 15-second videos that can also be shared. There will be 13 filters to start.
Instagram, which currently has 13 million monthly users with 16 billion shared photos, also competes with Twitter’s Vine—another version of a video-sharing app. But given how much people like to use Instagram especially among youth culture and fashion, it may have moved into the lead.
As illustrated in our Youth Culture Studies, as well as among some of the leading brands in fashion, Instagram has an important following. Entire collections, sneak-peaks, and launches have all benefited from Instagram.
With the growing number of short clip videos that fashion brands are utilizing to introduce their collections, you can bet that Insta-video is going to be utilized heavily. According to a recent story in WWD, brands such as Topshop are ecstatic over Instagram and the video component will ramp-up their marketing efforts. They say that Topshop has 1.06 million followers on Instagram, and following Victoria’s Secret, Nike and Forever 21 (with 2.08, 1.64 and 1.35 million followers, respectively) is among the most popular fashion brands on the platform.
In our research among youth culture markets and fashion, it’s apparent that Instagram is being used as a new form of communication, but as creating videos become even more popular, i.e. cell phone clips and YouTube videos, Instagram video make become more engaging than photos. However the conversion from photo-sharing or even video-sharing to an actual business model remains to be scene. Awareness is of course important especially when sharing among friends for viral effectiveness, but social media platforms still struggle with converting vast numbers of users into making vast amounts of revenue, as Instagram’s owner knows too well.
In addition is the ever-changing popularity of new social media platforms especially among youth culture for a variety of reasons, which shifts movement among this demographic onto the next social media platform. In our story, “Life after Facebook,” we quantify where this is happening already and why. While Instagram video is the next phase for the photo-sharing app, there’s a question of whether it is too late for the target market that tends to lead trends in social media platforms to begin with.
