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Instagram could soon launch a public “Collections” feature, signaling that it wants to compete with Pinterest, per TechCrunch.
Currently, Collections, which enables Instagrammers to save and organize their favorite posts, is only a private feature. The potential Pinterest copycat comes at a dangerous time for the visual search engine, which has just announced that it’s filing for its IPO.
If Instagram rolls out public Collections, it could boost usage among both users and brands:
- Public Collections would enable a new type of user engagement beyond sharing on users' core profiles. The public collections approach is essentially the use case on Pinterest: Pinterest users (so-called Pinners) engage on the platform by building out personal collections of posts, or Pins, that they like from across the site. Allowing users to save content from other accounts to their own collections would also feasibly limit the hazards of content stealing, and create a way of sharing posts that doesn't require reposting of content.
- Further, the feature could augment the e-commerce functionality of the app by giving brands another way to drive shopping habits and sales directly through the app. Brands could likewise take advantage of the feature in order to display curated collections of relevant or otherwise brand-representative posts. For its part, commerce is a key strategic use case that Pinterest claims over and above rival platforms: 83% of weekly Pinners have made a purchase based on Pins they saw from brands, per Pinterest data. Instagram is also heavily focused on driving shopping behavior among users, so it has some incentive to steer brands away from what it likely views as a rival for social commerce activity among users.
Public Collections on Instagram would likely mirror parent Facebook's growth strategy with Stories. It’s not out of character for Instagram parent Facebook to disrupt the growth trajectory of rival social platforms by stealing their best features, integrating them into their own apps, and scaling adoption across their user bases — ultimately supplanting the need for engagement on a rival app. As a case in point, Instagram launched Stories in October 2016, just a few months ahead of Snap’s IPO in early 2017: Snapchat’s growth has since stalled out, meanwhile Instagram Stories now has nearly three times as many users as Snapchat overall. If Instagram’s public Collections feature gets out ahead of Pinterest’s IPO, it could similarly stymie Pinterest’s growth expectations, particularly as the company looks to build a larger ad business.
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