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66ТЕХНИЧЕСКИЕ НАУКИ
INSTAGRAM'S CONSTANT INNOVATIONS ESTABLISH DOMINANT
MARKET POSITION Fakhrutdinova A.A.
Fakhrutdinova Albina Askarovna - Lecturer, COURSE INPRE-FOUNDATIONSTUDIES DEPARTMENT, WESTMINSTER INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY IN TASHKENT, TASHKENT, REPUBLIC OF UZBEKISTAN
Abstract: this report aims to discover ICT strategy solutions which Instagram has developed to gain competitive advantage in social media. Theoretical data has shown that this social media platform is gaining its popularity by being user-friendly, accessible and cost-efficient. This study also focuses to determine how Instagram rivals its competitors by considering ICT challenges in the marketplace and taking measures to overcome those. Based on a review of the literature, it can be concluded that Instagram has established a dominant market positioning in almost all parts of the world as it has a good financial support and constant innovation ensured by a parent company Facebook. The results indicate that Instagram has been successful in managing, creating and storing digital information by applying Artificial Intelligence and DeepText analytics algorithms to prevent users from cyberbullying and spamming. On this basis, to sustain its competitive advantage, Instagram is recommended to develop a universal platform for mobile (using other operating systems) and non-mobile users to access the application, to enable automatic watermarking features to solve privacy issues, and ensure photo/video copyrights. Further research is needed to identify other solutions that could strengthen the effectiveness of ICT solutions. The current report introduces major ICT solutions that contribute to the success of Instagram in the social networking.
Keywords: instagram, ICT solutions, competitive advantage.
Introduction
In the age of digitalization, social media is making the Internet not only a source of information, but also a source of influence (Hanna, Rohm, & Crittenden, 2011). One of the most popular social network platforms for individuals and businesses, which was launched in 2010, is Instagram. It started by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger in San Francisco. The word Instagram is a combination of "instant camera" and "telegram". It gained its popularity by presenting a unique mobile platform for sharing instant photos and videos with an enormous audience of active users (Larson& Draper, 2017). The application provides editing tools and features that can be applied to user's photos. In 2017, a new feature, being presented in a carousel format, was added and it allowed users to post multiple photos and videos at once. Inspired from its biggest rival Snapchat app, Instagram introduced a Stories feature in 2016. It allows users to share moments from their day that disappear after 24 hours. Having surpassed its competitors, Instagram introduced various page types such as personal user accounts, bloggers, online stores, business accounts, brand accounts, celebrities accounts and bots.
Instagram benefits from ICT solutions
There are several advantages to applying ICT solutions to build competitive strategy in boosting a certain business. First one is communication. Instagram being a social networking app allows not only regular users but also business partners to maintain relation with many people and companies across distances by sending "direct" messages. The platform encourages businesses to share their products or services on Instagram and consequently people can follow them. Gallion (2014) suggests that the platform reflects users' socializing needs and allows them to interact with each other through photo content and comments. This is the best example of building interactive following community.
Secondly, Instagram is cost effective and it reduces initial cost of business. Any person can download the app, install and use it in their smartphones. The app is gaining popularity as it is free to use, post, follow, and instant message.
Thirdly, Instagram is greatly available to people all over the world. In other words, the platform is accessible anytime and anywhere allowing businesses to promote and sell their products/services to different countries. In fact, the platform reached 1 billion monthly active users in 2019 while 200 million users visit at least one business profile daily. Instagram is the second most popular social network after Facebook in terms of active users. Another beneficial feature presented on Instagram is Stories. According to Hootsuite statistics (2019), 62% of people have become more interested in a brand/product after seeing in it Stories. It should be noted that businesses assess online customers' needs, purchase habits, lifestyles in order to stay competitive in global e-market.
Moreover, advertising is important to promote one's business. A photo or video shared show more information and promotes the brand/ product visually. Many popular brands such as Nike, Starbucks, Walt Disney World, GoPro, Levis and others use Instagram as a way of driving traffic to their websites to effectively engage with visitors. Web 2.0 introduced the opportunity to users to cooperate and share more open information online (Constantinides & Stefan, 2008). This is a good tool to collaborate both with regular and loyal consumers and build trust (Cova&Cova, 2002). In fact, Instagram effectively manages the shared data and makes it valuable by extracting customer insights from it. It sells targeted advertising to companies aiming to reach a certain customer profile by enabling artificial intelligence to evaluate the users' search preferences, engagement insights, things they like and people they follow.
Prioritizing user experience
Instagram has turned the shift to enhance the user experience by making sure they find the platform valuable. As the amount of content increases, it becomes increasingly more challenging to find content that each client can find important. Instagram found a good way to it. It modified its feed from reverse-chronological order to show content that users look for and share, machine-learning algorithms are to help filter the data and learn better over time what is the most important and appropriate for each user to create a personalized feed. Moreover, Instagram allows the users to generate their own content which already becomes a massive advertising industry. Many brands create their own hashtags and encourage users to post photos using those hashtags which unconsciously prompt them to advertise their brands.
Regarding security and privacy, Instagram has created a very useful policy where a user can keep profile private and only followers can see photos or videos. To follow someone's private profile, one needs to send a follow-up demand while the account user may either accept or reject the demand. Those who violate privacy policy can be banned from posting on Instagram. Another way of ensuring security is spam filtering. Instagram uses spam-fighting artificial intelligence. The spam filter will delete fake messages from nine-language accounts including English, Chinese, Russian, Arabic, and more. These are automatically deleted when messages are found. Instagram uses the DeepText artificial intelligence text analytics algorithm from Facebook that can almost understand the context of a message. Everything was working smoothly until the platform officials faced the challenge related to cyberbullying. The findings of a survey conducted by Ditch the Label reveal that Instagram was the site where 42 percent of over 10,000 UK teenagers aged 12-25 were mostly bullied. Having the biggest cyberbullying epidemic on any social media site, they became the first to use machine learning to delete offensive posts automatically, while Facebook and Twitter rely on users to do so. Based on the effective use of DeepText to detect and delete spam, Instagram officials started seeing it as a tool for detecting and deleting comments that violate Instagram's Community Guidelines. Humans checked and labelled real Instagram posts to help DeepText know what and what would not be deemed offensive material in some ways. Instagram posts were checked and tagged by humans to help DeepText understand what would be considered offensive material in certain ways and what would not be. If the algorithm is found to be abusive, it is removed immediately. Cyberbully prevention organizations gave positive
comments on the work DeepText is doing even though some messages may be misclassified as offensive when they are not.
Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom says that they are going to be a big data company which can be explained by the users' activity on the platform. Instagram has been successfully using artificial intelligence to provide insights into human behavior. For instance, Instagram users can easily find a photo (activity, place, event, etc.,) they are looking for by typing the tags and the search tools will categorize the things of interest out of millions of uploaded images to users.
What about the challenges?
However, there are certain challenges that Instagram officials should tackle to sustain its competitive advantage over other social networks. The platform has only mobile version (Android and IOS) which limits company's growth. Instead, it should be available on more non- mobile devices and enable to run the application through a web browser (Wilkerson, 2018). Another challenge is related to copyrights issue. People using Instagram may steal the photo/picture and present as their own. This can cause harm to business brands.
Instagram faces competition
Instagram mobile application has been popular ever since it was released. However, two main competitors Snapchat and Mobli sharing similar characteristics have entered the international market and may rival its popularity in the near future. Snapchat is a social network and a messaging platform allowing the users to send photos and short videos up to 10 seconds. Two additional features such as text chats and video calls have been recently added to the app. This application is different from other photo/video sharing platforms as its content disappears within a few seconds. Snapchat and Instagram have different approaches towards posting privacy: while Instagram willingly makes its users reveal their posting to anyone following their pages, Snapchat encourages their users to choose who they want to share their moments with. Another competitor is Snapseed released in the early 2012. The main difference between Instagram and Snapseed is that "this app is not designed for customers, it is designed for prosumers" (Karch, 2015). It targets those who want to achieve a high result in editing their pictures. Unless the measures are taken, Instagram might lose its "prosumers" to this app in the future.
Fig. 1. Snapchat Logo
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Fig. 2. Snapseed Logo vs. Instagram Logo
Instagram is user-friendly, whereas Snapseed "an artist's tool with more advanced features" (Karch, 2015). The app targets those who want to pursue a higher level of result in editing their pictures, and it requires a higher system specification to run the app. Hence, Instagram might lose its "prosumers" to this app in the future.
Conclusions and Recommendations
This report has examined the impact ICT technologies had on shaping Instagram's competitive sustainability related to information management and the challenges the company faced in the marketplace. Based on theoretical analysis, it can be emphasized that Instagram has good position and benefits a lot in terms of technological advancement and advertisement opportunities. Moreover, it has many users generating their own content which is being processed by artificial intelligence. Similarly, it is widely used by many businesses to grow their online presence.
Based on these conclusions, to further develop Instagram's information management strategy and maintain sustainable competitive advantage, it is recommended:
- to continuously apply innovative features to engage users as many similar social media platforms are emerging rapidly;
- to work out solutions in terms of protecting photo/video copyright issues;
- to create a platform allowing excluded mobile users to access the account through various operating systems such as Windows, Linux and Blackberry;
- to develop a universal application which can be downloaded to any type of devices;
- to add non-entertaining sections related to economy, politics, world news, sports and etc.;
- to enable an automatic watermarking feature to solve privacy issues;
- to increase product awareness by advertising the application in developing countries;
To conclude, the platform officials are successful in keeping Instagram's global position by gaining more target users and conquering untapped marketplaces. Although Instagram is user-friendly and has more than 800 million registered users, continued efforts are needed to maintain its information management positioning and sustain tough competition against social network rivals.
References
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C++ 17. ОСОБЕННОСТИ Яндайкина Е.А.
Яндайкина Елена Анатольевна - студент, Институт микроприборов и систем управления Национальный исследовательский университет Московский институт электронной техники, г. Москва
Аннотация: в статье анализируются особенности выпуска С++ 17. В C ++ 17 появились более широкие возможности, такие как структурированные привязки, складывающиеся выражения, обновленный порядок вычисления выражений. Было добавлено много новых и обновленных элементов.
Ключевые слова: C++, C++ 17, встроенные переменные, алгоритмы, шаблоны, указатели, выражения, логические операции.
С каждым выпуском C ++ его стандартная библиотека существенно расширяется. Библиотека не такая огромная, как те, которые мы можем использовать в средах Java или .NET, но, тем не менее, она охватывает много полезных элементов. Встроенные переменные.
В C ++ 17 больше не нужно указывать определение статических членов-данных в соответствующем исходном файле, так как вы можете использовать встроенные переменные. Компилятор гарантирует, что переменная имеет только одно определение и инициализируется только один раз через все блоки компиляции.
Компилятор удостоверится, что класс определен и инициализирован. Только один раз для всех модулей компиляции, которые включают файл заголовка. Выражение препроцессора
C ++ 17 предлагает удобную директиву препроцессора, которая позволяет вам проверить, присутствует ли заголовок или нет.
На протяжении многих лет_has_include был доступен как расширение в Clang. Теперь
это в стандарте!
С помощью_has_include мы можем написать следующее:
#if defined_has_include
# if_has_include(<charconv>)
# define has charconv 1
