Recently, audio of Mark Zuckerberg leaked from an all-hands meeting at Facebook, where he responded to concerns an employee raised about the growing competition their apps were facing from competitor TikTok.
And Zuck seems to have gotten things all wrong -- yet again.
Reuters
The Facebook CEO thinks the reason the Chinese app's user numbers have surged past that of Instagram is that they've taken existing Instagram features and put them together. Which is of course not true at all -- well, there will be some overlap, but to suggest that it was a mass exodus from Instagram to TikTok seems outlandish at best.
"They've married short-form, immersive video with browse. So it's almost like the 'Explore Tab' that we have on Instagram, which is today primarily about feed posts and highlighting different feed posts," Zuckerberg said, in the recordings published by The Verge.
Except, anyone actually on TikTok knows that's not the case. Sure, it has a level of exploring a feed, but that's a commonality on a very base level. To that end, TikTok has more in common with the now-defunct Vine than it does anything from Facebook.
Reuters
Instagram posts are all about looking perfect in aesthetically composed shots so you can show off your best life to your buddies. Stories meanwhile is more a sort of slice of life look behind the scenes. But TikTok is neither idyllic like Instagram main nor is it haphazard like Stories.
Instead, the app from ByteDance is more a storytelling medium than a flex platform (like Instagram), even if the stories being told are in short-video meme format. And it's not specifically for your friends either. The idea is to create something unique in the hopes it forms a trend among strangers, who will then copy and tweak it according to their own flavour, and so on.
Zuckerberg's failure to understand this fundamental difference might be part of why Instagram has been stagnating in the recent past. Unfortunately for him, he also didn't seem to have great idea of TikTok's potential, when this meeting occurred back in July. "I think we have time to learn and understand and get ahead of the trend," said Zuckerberg at the time.
Reuters
He went on to indicate he believed TikTok was growing quickly because they were throwing money into advertising, and their customer retention wasn't strong. "So the space is still fairly nascent, and there's time for us to kind of figure out what we want to do here," he said.?
As we know now, the exact opposite happened, and TikTok has grown into an undeniable behemoth across the world, even here in India. And it's mostly teenagers and adolescents on the platform, who are arguably stronger app drivers than the 20-30 somethings on Instagram. After all, the latter have noticed Instagram's traction start to flag, causing many of them to move to the wider appeal of Twitter.
And of course, there's the fact that Facebook in general has earned itself a bad reputation that sticks to it like tar. For older users, they're more worried about their data after the recent spate of breaches and leaks involving the company. And for the younger crowd, well they're not likely going to feel very cool on a platform with "old people". Plus TikTok lends itself perfectly to video memes, so the choice is clear.
Still, none of that has stopped Zuckerberg from attempting to swipe some of TikTok's userbase. Facebook recently launched another standalone app Lasso, with features similar to TikTok. It's garnered about 425,000 installs since it came out in November. TikTok meanwhile has about earned about 1.4 billion installs since its launch outside China.
And about 40 percent of that number is just from India, despite initial backlash from both the media and politicians concerning inappropriate content, and accidental deaths attributed to the app.