‘We are no longer a photo-sharing app’: Head of Instagram tells of platform’s future

Here’s what to expect from Instagram in the coming months

With heavy competition coming from video platform giant YouTube and the meteoric rise of TikTok, Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, shares what the platform plans to roll out in the next couple of months as they begin to shift priorities. The move is to provide more relevant content and help get more experiences for the users. With this, Adam relays that Instagram is now focusing on four key areas: creators, video, shopping, and messaging.

“The first is creators, and I’ve talked a lot about creators and trying to help them make a living, and this has to do with the shift in power from institutions to individuals across industries. The second is video. Video is driving an immense amount of growth, online for all the major platforms right now. The third is shopping. Now the pandemic shifted or accelerated the shift of commerce from offline to online by a number of years and we’re trying to lean into that trend. And the fourth is messaging, how people connect with their close friends has changed a lot over the last five years or so,” Adam explains on an Instagram post.

So why the change? “The number one reason people say that they use Instagram in research is to be entertained, so people are looking to us for that. So actually this past week in our internal audit, we shared, or I shared a lot about what we’re trying to do to lean into that trend into entertainment and into video,” he continues. “So what you’re going to see over the next couple months really is us start to experiment more in the space of what we call recommendations for showing you things in feed that you may not be following yet. We’re also going to be experimenting with how we embrace video more broadly full screen, immersive entertaining, mobile first video.”