TikTok Imitation Has Seemingly Made Some Social Platforms Indistinguishable

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. 

Actually, it wasn’t “they.” It was 18th-century British writer Charles Caleb Colton who is credited with the observation.  

Needless to say, Colton wasn’t referring to TikTok. At one time, the China-based social platform was a short-form, video-sharing app that allowed users to create, post and share 15-second videos on any topic. But recently, the company announced it’s allowing videos up to 10 minutes long, and here come the imitators. 

Adam Mosseri, head of Meta Platforms Inc.’s META Instagram, announced on Twitter Inc.’s TWTR social platform that the company will be getting what he referred to as an “immersive” viewing experience in the form of full-screen photos and videos directly in Instagram’s Home feed.

Instagram And YouTube Follow TikTok’s Lead

“At the beginning of the year, I talked about how important video and messaging was to the future of Instagram,” Mosseri said in a video clip embedded in his Twitter post. “We’re moving Instagram to a place where video is a bigger part of the Home experience, where content is more immersive — it takes up more of the screen.”

Instagram initially gained massive followers through its photo editing and sharing features but has recently pushed its video capabilities with Stories, IGTV, IG Live and Reels. Earlier this year, it began working with that immersive full-screen home feel Mosseri talked about, which is coincidentally similar to Tik Tok.

The move to video, seemingly proven by Tik Tok’s success, is to gain increased views, responses, interaction and overall engagement the medium receives over still photos. HubSpot Inc. HUBS, which develops software products for inbound marketing, sales and customer service, reported that consumption of YouTube videos doubles every year, and 80% of all consumers remember a video ad they watched in the past month on the channel.

Even with that success, it appears Alphabet Inc.’s GOOGL YouTube, not content with the fact that 5 billion people watch its videos every day, wants to imitate Tik Tok as well. The company announced the launch of YouTube Shorts, which are designed to entertain audiences and help brands and creators drive engagement with shorter videos.

Imitation may be flattery, but it also makes the companies arguably more indistinguishable from one another — in this case, from TikTok. 

Fandifi Says It Seeks Differentiation 

Vancouver-based Fandifi Technology Corp., a crowd-based and system-generated prediction and fan engagement platform, reports attempting to take a step away from imitation and toward differentiation. Fandifi says it provides users with a unique agnostic platform allowing content creators to show their creativity and versatility — the company  employs a unique system that incentivizes their loyalty and activity with its enterprise prediction engine to engage its fans. 

Fandifi wants what YouTube and TikTok have — billions of viewers with the eventual addition of millions of content creators — and states it looks to change the way people interact with streamed and broadcast content around the world.

Fandifi reports building a crowd-based and system-generated prediction and fan engagement platform that runs on an associated neural network, designed for content creators to increase gamification of their content and increase fan engagement regardless of the distribution. Fandifi also operates www.fandomart.com, a non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace where rewards can be bought, sold or traded on an interoperable blockchain agnostic platform.

The opportunity for Fandifi could be that while consumers now watch movies on mobile devices, streaming platforms on phones and movies on TV, no one form of content is distributed on one communication medium. Podcasts, for instance, are recorded and released on YouTube and Spotify Technology SA SPOT — the adage “the medium is the message” no longer necessarily applies.  

Meanwhile, Fandifi is betting on the convergence of sports and e-sports to become its primary high-growth streamed form of content because of its immediacy in sharing live results with a global audience. The company believes that with the convergence in e-sports and sports, the two will be on par with each other in 10 to 15 years. 

For more information on Fandifi Technology, go to www.fandifi.com.  

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Featured photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash