What’s the equivalent of a duel when there are three competitors? It would be a handy word to know because that’s what we’re dealing in the social media video world right now.

Instagram is hot on the heels of Tik Tok with weekly changes aiming to keep the OG app at the same pace of Tik Tok. Instagram’s CEO Adam Mosseri posts regular videos to his Instagram account to explain new updates and what it means for the future of the app, likely to appear to be transparent and honest — even when their parent company’s Facebook is not in a good place at all.

To add to the competition, Tik Tok launched an update this week that will see videos on the platform up to a maximum length of 10 minutes where it was previously three minutes. It’s a strange decision given the app’s purpose was to deliver bite-sized content up to a minute when it was first going viral. It seems like Tik Tok has its eye on the other player in the video game: YouTube.

YouTube was beta-testing Shorts in 2021 (which you can read about here), so sitting back from an observer’s view, each platform is trying to cross-check the areas that its rivals cover and trying to do it better… but we’ll see about that.

The beauty of social media once was that each platform had its own thing; a few common denominators but a sense of differentiation. Instagram was visual, Twitter more written. Facebook was about connecting, YouTube was about watching. At the time, outliers like Snapchat and Tik Tok (previously named Musical.ly) had some mystery about them with disappearing messages and timed content. Now?

Every platform is trying to do everything. As the thought goes, it’s better to do less things twice as well rather than more things less well. We’ll see how the ten minute videos go on Tik Tok and how it affects YouTube, and if Instagram develops something over the weekend to compete! 😉