Instagram continues to play Copy-Cat with new Dual-Camera format suspiciously similar to BeReal - Your Daily Dose of Digital - 30/08/22
James Gray
Head of Digital & Creative | 20+ Yrs as an Innovative Digital, Marketing & Tech Professional
You'll have undoubtedly been keeping up with the recent changes to Instagram, both in terms of their algorithm updates & its favouritism for Reels as it looks to quash the impact of TikTok and YouTube Shorts on it's audience's attention - but, they've been very much putting their energies into the "let's just take their differentiators and copy them, rather than innovating" camp, rightly or wrongly. This seems to continue with one of their latest updates, looking to fend off BeReal's USP of time-sensitive content with a dual-camera view.
For those of you missing the boat so far with BeReal, it's a (slightly) innovative take on the sharing of 'story' moments, where everyday at a different time, everyone is notified simultaneously to capture and share a Photo in 2 Minutes.
The concept here is for BeReal to offer a new and unique way to "discover who your friends really are in their daily life".?I was a pretty early adopter of BeReal a few months back, and to be honest the "critical mass" of friends on the platform who could even possibly keep me engaged was not met, so I got bored of it pretty quickly - However, I could see how the app would be quite fun and have a moment in the sun once adopted by more users.
Basically, you're taking a picture of what's in front of you, and your face in the process, giving a more "personal" view of how you're feeling in the moment. I was often notified to take my BeReal when I was at my desk or eating lunch (or both concurrently) so you can imagine the faces which accompanied my rather boring activities!
Meta look to be staving-off BeReal's traction by taking the main USP and integrating it into Instagram, layering this as a creative format option within Reels.
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This is not the first (not even the second or third) time Instagram has "borrowed" ideas from competitors to add to it's product. From Stories, inspired by Snapchat; to Reels, inspired by TikTok, they've had a fair few "inspirational" moments from fellow apps:
But is this level of copy-cattery (yes, I made that word up), illegal in any way? Well, according to a Forbes article, "Facebook’s systematic copycat strategy, which the markets have greeted with a 6% share price increase, is among the tactics the U.S. Congress’ antitrust subcommittee documented last week as potentially harmful to competition."
"This is precisely what antitrust legislation is supposed to prevent: competitors so powerful and with unlimited resources, that when faced with any initiative that could be considered as competition, they simply buy it or copy. With TikTok being fought on multiple fronts, competitors were bound to try to fill the gap with clones, but Facebook’s strategy is simply based on replicating a rival’s very successful product, and from a position of clear and undoubted leadership. If that’s not a case of predatory competition, then nothing is."
A pretty clear stance, but it appears that very little has been done thus far, legally speaking, to combat this.
One would assume that app users would 'vote with their feet' (or fingers) in using the app more, or embracing the new functionality Instagram will have had to invest in - with this in mind, only time will tell if the dual-camera feature will take off, or just be another distracting option in the menagerie of post types.
As the article concludes: "Next time you try to upload a simple photo and find that the app now offers you several more alternatives, some longer, some shorter, some ephemeral, some permanent and some a combination thereof: don’t worry, you haven’t suddenly turned into a technophobe. It’s what happens when an app that was originally simple and well-thought out becomes an umbrella used to cover all kinds of tools copied from others. It’s a strategy that may have worked in the past, but that has surely passed its sell-by date."
What do you think about Instagram's & Meta's general approach to copy rather than innovate with their long-established apps? Let me know in the comments.