Brands Use Instagram Stories More Than Twice as Often as Snapchat

Can Instagram finally eat Snapchat’s lunch once and for all? According to a new report from L2, brands are uploading to Instagram Stories more than twice as often as they are on Snapchat. The firm tracked 89 brands who have both an Instagram and Snapchat account during July, finding that marketers posted 1,347 Instagram Stories compared to 614 Snapchat Stories. During the week of July 10, for example, 41 percent of marketers used Instagram Stories compared to 9 percent of brands who posted to Snapchat. Moreover, Snapchat Stories are concentrated to a smaller section of brands, namely beauty and hair care marketers. Seventy-two percent of the Snapchat Stories analyzed came from beauty brands while retailers made up 13 percent of snaps. Travel, automotive, consumer electronics and activewear made up the remaining 15 percent. On Instagram Stories, beauty and hair care brands made up 38 percent of the posts analyzed while retailers generated 26 percent of Stories. Luxury and consumer-packaged-goods marketers posted 21 percent of content. The other 15 percent of content came from activewear, consumer electronics and other types of marketers. “As Instagram becomes the mainstream choice for brand Stories, Snapchat risks being niche-ified,” wrote L2 in the report. Snapchat has been under fire from Instagram for more than a year, as the Facebook-owned app has steadily ripped off Snapchat’s features while increasing its users thanks to support and targeting tools from Facebook’s ecosystem. In June, Instagram reported 250 million daily users for Stories while Snap said it had 166 million daily users during its first earnings call in May. While Snapchat has added tools for its users like links, “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,” L2 noted in the report. “Snapchat, meanwhile, has made few adjustments to its Stories content tools, limiting the ability of brands to leverage owned content for ecommerce.” The report also analyzed Facebook Live videos and L2 tracked 45,000 videos from 426 brands that were uploaded between August 2016 and June 2017. The firm found that 4.4 percent of brands’ uploaded videos in June were created with Facebook Live, up from 1 percent in August 2016. Luxury was the top category for brands using Facebook Live, making up 22 percent of the clips uploaded. Automotive made up 20 percent, activewear generated 14 percent and beauty brands uploaded 11 percent of the clips. There’s still some work to be done around making sure that people see branded Live videos in newsfeeds though—unless you want to pay. Per L2, 78 percent of Facebook Live video views were paid, an increase from 57 percent in November 2016. L2 pointed to Samsung as an example of a brand pouring money into Facebook Live—the manufacturer spent nearly $3 million on Facebook ads during the first quarter of 2017 as it launched the Galaxy 8 smartphone. A 90-minute livestream of the brand’s Unpacked event included paid promotion and racked up 1.6 million views and 14,000 shares.