The competition of ‘stories’ platforms, Instagram and Snapchat, is turning out to be a no-competition going by the latest stats from a report by L2, a digital media rating agency that benchmarks the performance of over 1,800 brands across 14 industries globally. L2 had been studying 89 brands that maintain both Instagram and Snapchat accounts and found that Instagram Stories attracted more than twice as many posts from social media marketers compared to Snapchat Stories.
The stories posted on Instagram were 1,347 against 614 posted on Snapchat. The report also found that 72% of Snapchat Stories account for posts from beauty brands, 13% accounted for retail brands, while travel, automotive, consumer electronics and activewear brands accounted for about 15%.
The other metrics that prove the point about Instagram racing past Snapchat is that 200 million people watch Instagram Stories every day as compared to 160 million that watch Snapchat. On Instagram advertisers can get swipe-up links, linked influencer tags and check out buttons that allow users to shop on the app. On Snapchat, brands only get advertisers’ links and a user base that doesn’t like ads. The L2 report warns, “As Instagram becomes the mainstream choice for brand Stories, Snapchat risks being niche-ified.” Snapchat needs to find ways to stop its slide before it’s too late.
The L2 report further noted, “Instagram has integrated ecommerce handoff technology into Stories, namely swipe-up links leading to brand sites, linked influencer tags, and checkout buttons that support brand efforts to move beyond engagement metrics and render their live video content shoppable. Snapchat, meanwhile, has made few adjustments to its Stories content tools, limiting the ability of brands to leverage owned content for ecommerce.” It’s been over a year that Snapchat has been up against the supercharged growth of Instagram backed by parent Facebook’s might.