Instagram Challenges SnapChat With Curated Videos

On Saturday, Instagram launched their very first curated collection of Halloween videos for the entire Instagram Community. All Instagram members found a banner at the top of their live feeds and encouraged them to view the best Halloween videos across the nation. Very similar to Snapchat’s Live Stories section and Twitter’s Moments section, Instagram creates a more robust way to highlight “as-it-happens” content. Instagram recently told Recode in an interview that, “This is just the start. This is a new way to experience events and big moments, as they just happen, through the eyes of the Instagram community.”

Back in June 2015, Instagram revamped its search feature so their newly curated collection of Halloween videos should not be a big surprise to the Instagram community. Instagram’s new search feature helps to better collect content around specific topics whereas their aggregate videos of Halloween are simply a real-time version of that. If you selected to “Watch Halloween’s Best Videos,” you were redirected to a full-screen page where you could swipe up and down to view the string of videos that played automatically.

Instagram’s best of Halloween videos collection is like a cable network that requires people to choose the programs. Amanda Kelso, Facebook’s community director, and her team sifted through all videos posted to Instagram to create the heavily curated video collection for Halloween. Their team also requested users to submit posts for consideration using the hashtag #IGHalloween in order to quickly sift through Halloween’s best, bad, and ugly videos.

Instagram plans to launch more pop-up video and photo channels to incorporate universal events including, but not limited to, music festivals, winter holidays, and even breaking news events such as the Nepal earthquake. Today, if you go to Instagram’s explore tab, you will find a “The Week on Instagram” section where you can view a collection of videos and images from “emerging voices and stories around the world” from last week.

As a way to better organize their online activities and identities on Instagram by bringing event-specific content together, Instagram is simplifying their user experience on their platform. As a result, Instagram has created a portal for their users to be at the front and center during popular offline events in the most efficient way possible today.

The next step, for the Facebook-owned platform, is to figure out a way to incorporate some form of brand sponsorship or event-specific advertising. That way they can turn the curated video stream into a solid revenue-generating program.

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