Instagram and Snapchat in the geostickers “battle”

Instagram and SnapChat features go hand-in-hand,with Instagram taking a lot of inspiration from SnapChat and its successful tools.

In March, Instagram has launched geostickers ( a kind of like stickers that represent your location and only work in Instagram’s ephemeral Stories feature), a feature that already had a lot of success on SnapChat.

On SnapChat, geofilters are creative overlays that capture where you are or what you’re up to in a Snap! Create your own, and surprise Snapchatters in the locations you choose. On a business side, Geofilters offer a chance to be seen and sent by Snapchatters at your store, event, or other location. A business can drive awareness and engagement, in one swipe. At the moment, On-Demand Geofilters are available in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Saudi Arabia, UAE, France, the United Kingdom, and most of the USA.

To see the available filters in your area, simply take a picture or record a video and then swipe across the screen. There are two types of On-Demand filters are offered: Personal and Business. In their guidelines, Snapchat explains:

• A Personal Geofilter is one that doesn’t include any branding, business marks/names, or logos, and doesn’t promote a business or a brand. You might submit a Personal Snapchat Geofilter to celebrate a birthday or graduation, for example.
• A Business Geofilter is one that promotes a business or a brand.  If you’re creating a Business filter, you must have the necessary rights and permissions to include any business names, marks, logos, or trademarks and you must also supply a business name while purchasing the filter.

More about it you can read here.

And here.

Creating smart, beautiful and interesting geofilters for SnapChat became a business on its own, as companies such as Geofilter Studio, Canva or Pepper Filters prove it.

But how do geofilters work in Instagram? According to TechCrunch, the one thing Instagram’s geostickers and filters do that Snap’s don’t is show the Instagram location page for that place with a tap, though Stories posts won’t show up there, so there’s no privacy issue with that.”All of Instagram’s cloning efforts seem to be paying off. Instagram Stories already has 150 million daily users, more than Snap’s original version of the feature. Instagram Stories is stealing Snapchat usage, which led Snapchat’s user growth to plummet 82 percent in the two quarters after Facebook’s copycat spun up. Now worries about Snap’s growth are sinking into its share price, which slumped 12 percent yesterday and 11 percent today after its 40 percent IPO pop,” wrote TechCrunch in March.

When you click on a geofilter from someone’s Location Story, that geofilter will direct you to Instagram’s Places page, which contains a collection of other users’ posts tagged with the same location. From there, you can watch a long reel of Stories from strangers who have visited and tagged the place you are in.

“If Instagram decides to monetize Location Stories, it will likely look and function similarly to the hashtag feature in Stories Instagram is currently rolling out. Brands will be able to purchase tagged geofilters, featuring their brand name, logo, and location. When Instagrammers click on the filter, they will either be redirected to the Places pages or to the brand’s Instagram page. From either of those pages, Instagrammers can view the business location, get directions, and get familiarized with the brand through the UGC content people posted in Places and the content posted on the brand’s page,” wrote advertisemint.com.