Instagram’s user numbers have reached two billion as of Jan. 2024, but it seems like the social media site has been waning cultural influence and has been losing user engagement. Why is this? The site hasn’t made many substantial changes since its launch in 2010 but there are still a number of factors that are now working against it.

One of the biggest factors is the rise of TikTok and its appeal to a younger audience, seemingly poaching younger Instagram users to the newer app. It was reported that about 25% of Tik Tok’s users are 10-19 years old, which is shockingly different to Instagram’s 5.1% of users being 17 and younger. Instagram just clearly doesn’t have an audience with the younger generation, one of the biggest markets on social media. 

But, Instagram’s parent company Meta has attempted to compete with TikTok due to the introduction of “Reels.” Reels, short-form ‘TikTok like’ videos, has become Instagram’s biggest source of engagement but it still hasn’t been enough to even come close to TikTok’s numbers. Most of the reasons for this are fairly obvious, the same type of content on Reels is on TikTok which is a significantly more user friendly platform. For content creators, TikTok is far easier to post on and the app is constantly gaining major updates that keep it fresh. Even TikTok’s never ending controversy in the mainstream news is helping it, as any publicity is good publicity.

Just like Reels and TikTok, Meta introduced their own competitor to Twitter with “Threads.” Threads was dead on arrival, it was a half baked copy of Twitter that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg thought was going to be bigger than it was. 

With the introduction of these concepts, it’s clear that Instagram has been left in the dust with focus shifting to those two. It’s become an app that users post on every few months then forget about until the next time they post. And if you were to scroll on Instagram; in-between your friends posts would be incessant advertising for anything from Threads to jackets for dogs or even DJ equipment. 

I conducted an experiment and scrolled on Instagram for about three minutes. Out of the 15 posts I saw, four of them were random advertisements for Target, Allstate, CeraVe and a golf course in Ocean City, MD. This is a problem.

If Instagram wishes to return to the fun site it used to be, many obvious changes need to happen which begins with the advertising. Users should not be bombarded with pointless campaigns for the most random products possible the second they open the app. Meta should also just forget about competing with other more popular sites because it is just an uphill battle. If people want short-form content they will go to TikTok and for news they’ll go to Twitter, that’s not going to change.

Instead, they need to focus on making posting more fun and give users incentives to post more often. “Finstas,” more casual  “fake-instas” that encourage frequent posting, have slowly become more popular. It’s exactly what the platform needs. Meta should focus on promoting the personalized and intimate postings seen on finsta accounts. 

But it may be too late to shift the tide, and it seems like Instagram will continue to slide in relevance unless major change is made to the platform.