One of the primary reasons users prefer other content creation platforms such as TikTok is due to their reduced barrier to discoverability. Research shows that Instagram heavily monetizes advertising, requiring content shared to have a large number of views. Hence, to increase revenue through advertising, we need to improve content discoverability.

Tiktok being Instagram's main competitor in the field, we conducted an analysis of their content creation platform, to gather an understanding of the problem space, and evaluating features that potentially attract content creators to use their platform over Instagram's. The following are the key features we identified:

We interviewed around 10 content creators, with around 50-100K followers, who engage in both Instagram and TikTok platforms for content creation to understand their preference of platform and the hurdles they face when creating content on Instagram. The following are our findings categorized by 3 user types:

Consolidating the user interviews, we mapped out the user journey of content creators on Instagram, to understand the pain points and areas of improvement. The following is the user journey map we created:

Our research suggested that content creators tend to gravitate away from Instagram platform for a variety of reasons. The following are our main takeaways:

These findings illuminated the significant obstacles young/new content creators face on Instagram. Establishing a social media presence and credibility can be challenging, particularly in the initial stages, and Instagram being a more established social media platform, is also saturated with established influencers, making it less enticing for building a presence.

Based on the User Research findings, we crafted two user personas of different tiers of influencers - Aspiring content creator (0 - 10K followers), Emerging content creators (10K - 100K followers) & Established content creators (100K+ followers). We decided to focus on Aspiring & Emerging content creators as they hold a significant market share of influencers on Instagram. The following are the personas drafted:

Our idea focuses on enhancing discoverability by leveraging AI to provide analytics and editing suggestions, enabling content creators to produce faster, higher-quality content, ultimately leading to increased views and discoverability.