When it comes to social media, there are quite a few big players..such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, SnapChat, and Instagram. Notably, Menlo Park-based social networking firm, Facebook Inc. always continues to secure its space as the social internet giant.
According to a research that was done by a Mobile App Analytics firm; Sensor Tower found out that Four out of the Five (4/5) most downloaded apps across the globe during the last quarter belonged to Facebook..i.e: WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, while SnapChat came in the fifth position.
However, even though all these social media platforms have multiple unique features of their own, they don’t shy away from copying some features (especially the most popular/common ones) from their rivals and implementing them as their own.
Here are some ways big social media platforms have copied a feature or two from their rival(s). In this scenario, we’re only looking at Facebook & its owned-app (WhatsApp and Instagram), and then Twitter.
1. Stories
This is a feature that nearly all big platforms have copied from SnapChat…..’Stories’. It was first adopted by Instagram, then WhatsApp and finally mother of all social networks; Facebook. Stories allow users to upload GIFs, a short video or photos having a validity of 24 hours.
2. Live Streaming
Micro-blogging website, Twitter Inc. introduce its live streaming app Periscope in March 2015 and has become really popular. In the same year in August, Facebook saw the huge potential and decided to take the step and launched its own version for its a billion-users. First launched and made available to mobile devices (and Pages), but Facebook recently the services for all users to be able to stream directly from desktops/laptop, as promised last year in September.
3. Hearts
Facebook and Instagram had been going crazy with Hearts for quite some time, and Twitter finally decided to join as well. The micro-blogging platform decided to ditch the Stars it used for favorites (like) to adopt to the use of hearts.[related-posts]
4. Video Auto-plays
Seeing how Facebook’s autoplay videos were doing, Twitter rolled out a similar functionality that allows users to watch videos that play automatically when scrolled down.
5. #Hashtags
Hashtags pretty much begun with Twitter, and then photo and video-sharing platform Instagram came to adopt the idea and has since then made them popular. The Explore tab allows users to look for content based on Hashtags they’ve used.
As we conclude, there’s one other feature, Pin feature Twitter has the pin tweet feature where tweeps pin a single tweet on their timeline, and looks like Facebook-owned messaging platform will soon get one. In the latest beta version of WhatsApp, allows users to pin 3 of their favorite chats. The feature hasn’t been rolled out though, but only available for users in the WhatsApp Beta Community. So once this comes out, we shall definitely say WhatsApp got the idea from Twitter.
