Snapchat and Instagram are starting to chase the same growth strategy

We don’t post to social media like we used to — and it’s causing Snapchat to shift its strategy.

In Snap CEO Evan Spiegel’s annual letter to employees, he said the platform had been “challenged by declines in Friend Stories,” the photos and videos people post for their friends to view in the app.

“Historically, Friend Stories served as one of our most important conversation starters, creating the spark that turned a story reply into a chat and a chat into a deeper friendship,” Spiegel wrote.

Now, those conversations are being “sparked” in new ways, particularly by Snapchat’s TikTok-like feed of short videos, called Spotlight.

Instead of chatting with their friends about their own videos, Snapchat users are using influencer videos as conversation starters.

“We need to embrace this transition fully,” Spiegel said, including making it “effortless” to share Spotlight content in stories or chats.

Snap is looking to Spotlight, launched in 2020, as a growth engine as it looks to reach 1 billion users. In August, Snap reported that Spotlight content reached more than 550 million monthly active users on average in the second quarter and attributes more than 40% of total content time spent to the feature.

Spiegel isn’t the only social media executive following this shift in user behavior.

Instagram has been experiencing a similar “paradigm shift” with users sharing content privately (like DMs) over publicly (such as to stories or the feed), Meta’s head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, told Business Insider’s Peter Kafka in May.

Mosseri said the platform is “doubling down” on messaging. In recent months, Instagram has released a slew of new DM features.

Platforms are prioritizing shareable content

The next step for platforms like Snapchat and Instagram is to tweak their products to capitalize on the shift in user behavior.

For Snapchat, that means “adjusting our ranking systems to prioritize sharing and conversations,” Spiegel said, as well as building out more social ways to play games or use filters (called Lenses on Snap).

Spiegel said the app would also develop more “conversation starters” such as new “status updates” to spur more connections on the app.

Meanwhile, Instagram added more ways to spur conversations with friends last month.

After years of users asking for a repost feature, Instagram finally caved and gave the people what they wanted. The feature is yet another new way to share content with friends and followers.

Instagram also expanded its “friends tab,” where you can see what your friends are reposting, liking, or posting themselves, and then reply to them instantly with a DM. And it ripped a page out of Snapchat’s playbook by introducing a social map.

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