The continued rise of Facebook: can anyone stop it?

It’s no coincidence that the fall of Vine coincided with the ability to put videos on Instagram. This happened only a year after the photo sharing giant was bought by Facebook. Now it’s Snapchat under attack as Instagram has launched its own ‘story’ function that mimics the whole concept of the app, but conveniently tucked into a corner of the Instagram interface. Rather inconveniently for Snapchat, it’s only growing in popularity.

The reason for this is quite simply that Instagram is a much more open platform; the beauty of apps like Instagram and Twitter is the ability to gain an insight into the lives of people we wouldn’t normally encounter. We can get up to the minute insights into what the Kardashian’s are wearing or the latest diet fad is first hand, something that is much more difficult on Snapchat.

Of course there are benefits to Snapchat; Snapchat isn’t based on likes or followers so there is no scope for fake news to be spread, features such as ‘Discover’ are heavily vetted so that content is of a certain quality and, most relevant to us, advertising is integrated into the customer experience so it is un-intrusive whilst also interactive.

There is a reason for this. “Snapchat makes discovery of people who aren’t in your phone book extremely difficult because they believe peer-to-peer sharing is stickier than a so-called influencer model,” says Rob Fishman, co-founder of Niche, a company that connects brand with social media influencers.

The combination of this and Snapchat’s venture into wearable tech means there may be a future for the app but whether it will able to hold its own against the Facebook empire remains to be seen, as in 2017 Instagram’s influence is set to grow even further. In terms of advertising Instagram is predicted to usurp Twitter, meaning Facebook will hold the gold and silver medals in the social media marketing race, a truly astonishing feat. Luckily for Twitter, Facebook has already adopted some of the character traits of Twitter, such as hashtags and an increased ability to share content and news, but has never been able to mimic the balance of intimacy and worldwide scope that Twitter delivers – it remains safe for the time being.

In our expert opinion Snapchat remains a contender – for now. And there is no doubt that Twitter will be around as a major social media platform for a long time to come, but Facebook ultimately reigns almighty.