Battle of the Brands: Instagram Reels Vs Chingari

Content is king – we all know that. But now, more than ever, content consumption has really gone up, largely due to the fact that people have so much more time on their hands. Content consumption not only means producing more content, it also drives the need for more means of distribution of said content. Which brings us to the newest kid on the block – Instagram Reels. After a successful experiment in Brazil, Instagram decided to launch Reels in France, Germany and India more or less at the same time and the internet was absolutely abuzz with it this week. It would only be fair to compare it with another app which has recently gained momentum, so we chose home-grown Chingari.

 

Talkwalker, a social media analytics company, based in Luxembourg, provides information on the using their platform. Talkwalker Analytics analyses the performance of mentions all over the internet and provides key metrics such as engagement, related themes, demographic data, geographic data and influencer data. 

 

Mentions: 

 

 

It’s definitely fair to say the internet exploded with the reels conversation once it came into the limelight – as is quite obvious from the graph, this conversation only began this week and we can see that Reels is already ahead of Chingari just over the last 7 days. Prior to the launch of Reels though, Chingari was making headlines. The big peak for Chingari comes on July 4 where they have a lot of loyal users/fans endorsing the product and encouraging others to downloadthe app and try it out. For Reels, their big peak was on their launch date where people made a lot of memes on how Reels is filling the gap for the short form content in India. The next one is associated with Katrina Kaif’s early adoption of the platform.

 

Demographics: 

 

Who’s talking about these two platforms? Before we get into who’s talking about it, it’s essential to keep in mind that both these platforms are designed for the same age group and demographic. This is also reflected in the numbers. Chingari stands out here with a larger number of women talking about the platform as well as a larger number of people from the older demographic (35+) talking about it.

 

Hashtags:

 

It’s always great to know what’s trending and hashtags tell us exactly that. For Reels it’s quite straightforward, the two largest hashtags are about the platform itself and a third smaller one is about TikTok. For Chingari, it’s slightly different – apart from the largest hashtag bubble being about Chingari, you also see a couple of other apps – Zoom and TikTok. There are a number of bubbles like #SupportDesi, #LocalDesi and more, presumably because Chingari is a wholly Indian app and it’s in line with PM Modi’s calls to be self-reliant. It is also for similar reasons that we see the #China hashtag there.

 

Visual insights:

 

 

Visual insights talk about the form of content that is buzzing. Since these two are extremely visual apps, it comes as no surprise that the content about them largely contains images. 95.8% of Reels content contains images and 88.2% of Chingari focused content contains images. The rest is mainly video. Additionally, it’s interesting to note that the content for both the apps are mainy outdoor focused.