UPDATE — Six months after conducting this initial study, we repeated our study to see if these trends would continue, plateau, or reverse. The finds are astonishing. View our follow-up study here.
The introduction of Instagram Stories in August 2016 presented a major threat to Snapchat, crippling its user growth by 82% almost immediately. This month, Instagram stories reached 200 million daily active users, officially surpassing Snapchat in popularity just 8 months after its launch.
Users are shifting their attention to Instagram Stories en masse, which raises the question: have top Snapchat influencers shifted their attention, too?
To answer this question, we looked at 12 top social media influencers (known for posting on Snapchat regularly) and their’ activity on both Instagram and Snapchat for a period of 30 days. Each day, we tracked the number of stories they posted on each app. Our results indicate that influencers overwhelmingly prefer Instagram Stories to Snapchat Stories.
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We recorded more stories on Instagram than Snapchat on 25 out of the 30 days, and 8 of the 12 influencers posted more stories to Instagram than to Snapchat over the course of the study. On average, influencers posted 6.6 stories per day on Instagram, compared to 5.3 stories per day on Snapchat.
Key Takeaways
Complete List Of Snapchat & Instagram Influencers
There are a number of factors that may be contributing to influencers’ shift to Instagram. Instagram readily offers a wider variety of features and a larger audience for influencers to engage with. Furthermore, Instagram provides the opportunity to include external URLs, and its search feature is significantly easier to use.
Related Post: Why Top Influencers Are Leaving Snapchat For Instagram
These results indicate that in addition to gaining more users than Snapchat, Instagram Stories is also earning the attention of top power users, who are increasingly posting to Instagram Stories and forgoing Snapchat. This trend is likely to continue and has major implications for the $1 billion dollar Instagram influencer market and influencer marketing as a whole.
As users and influencers alike migrate to Instagram Stories, marketers should follow the trend and focus on creating successful Instagram Stories campaigns with influencers.