TikTok Vs Instagram New Battlefront: CapCut vs Edits
TikTok Ban Shows Twitter's Strengths and Weaknesses + Video Editing heats up
One interesting observation through the TikTok shutdown saga is the value of Twitter (aka x). Twitter stands despite legacy’s media best efforts to kill it post-Elon acquisition. The reason why mainstream media outlets can’t kill twitter is because it is still the fastest source of breaking information of all the social platforms.
On Instagram people were mourning the loss of TikTok heading into this weekend. Twitter users engaging on this topic were aware that Shou Zi Chew (CEO of TikTok) was headed to the presidential inauguration. They were also aware of Trump’s pronouncements to save TikTok.
There was between a half day to a two days of information asymmetry on TikTok’s ban coverage for twitter users relative to Instagram. Breaking news is partially more prevalent because of anonymous accounts. Anonymous accounts are a double edge sword because it also comes with increased toxic behavior and trolls. Twitter will fundamentally always be a more toxic place if it wants to retain it’s breaking news identity.
Instagram Edits - A rare situation where Meta was too slow to imitate a competitor
Meta recently revealed Instagram Edits. Edits is a video editor meant to compete with TikTok / Bytedance’s CapCut video editor.
CapCut was available internationally in 2020. It had 200 million active users in 2022. CapCut has a billion downloads from the Google Play Store alone as of January 2025.
Meta / Instagram Leadership’s two biggest strategic mistakes against TikTok were:
Not focusing on making the best video editing tool
Promoting TikTok indirectly by showing videos with TikTok watermarks in a desperate initial catch-up effort
The platform with the best content creation tools gets the best content first. When you make it easy for people to edit quality videos on your app, they use it to record and edit more. They share the edited content first on the platform they first do the editing on.
TikTok’s superior video editing meant that social video creators have started their user journeys on TikTok first for the past four years. This also led to the TikTok watermark proliferating throughout Instagram. The strategic mistake of the product team of Instagram was not understanding this basic user flow from the perspective of the content creators.
Almost every early Reels video on Instagram had the TikTok watermark because Instagram did not develop better video editing tools earlier. If Instagram created Edits earlier or focused on Instagram’s default video editing tools, TikTok would not have been able to monopolize the market of short form video content creators.
Instead Instagram was effectively paying video content creators to share videos that were first made on TikTok. They were paying creators to promote TikTok because all the early Reels videos had a TikTok watermark for almost two years.
One thing Edits has going for it is video analytics integrations. Analytics is what has allowed Youtube to maintain long-form video supremacy. Instagram Edits’ preview page on the Apple App Store suggests that content creators will be able to see some form of analytics associated with Instagram video performance if they use Edits.
The better the analytics, the more video creators can optimize their videos. This in turn will subconsciously make content creators focus on optimizing their Instagram videos. Especially if Instagram shares data on the video that is not accessible anywhere else.
Edits might lure away some video creators since CapCut moved from being a free tool to one with a subscription fee. This free offering might be able to draw content creators just starting off.
Virality and view counts is lower but Instagram still commands higher compensation for content creators.
Can Edits catch up? It will need to if Instagram wants to catch up in video. Otherwise Instagram’s recent move to turn all Instagram square grids into rectangles will be for naught.
Do you use CapCut? If so, I’d love to learn what it would take for you to move to competing free platform that was free.