The social media space is continually evolving, especially from the perspective of marketing. This is best embodied by the rise of TikTok, which has seen its popularity boom during the last three years in an increasingly competitive market.
In October 2021, the platform posted 1 billion active users for the first time, up by 45% since July 2020. By December, the site had more than 271 million global users, up from just 55 million in January 2018.
TikTok is now a highly effective marketing tool, with the site having stolen a march on more established rivals like Instagram. But could the site face a more robust challenge from the new OMNI site? Let’s find out.
What is OMNI?
The OMNI platform is currently being touted as being “not just an app, but a mega app”, thanks largely to its ambitious design and relatively large number of features.
At its core, OMNI is a short-format video-sharing app, and one that boasts an array of in-demand tools. These include the capacity for real-time story sharing and interactive chat between users, alongside the creation of monetised channels.
OMNI also enables users to act as merchants and empower in-app purchases, from both branded stores and NFT markets. Similarly, the platform allows you to send digital gifts to your favourite creators, blurring the lines between ecommerce and social platforms in the process.
This also touches on OMNIs’ unique operational model, which is built on blockchain technology and completely decentralised.
Because of this, creators will often be remunerated in the form of exchangeable OMNI tokens. This will also underpin a unique and completely transparent earnings model, ensuring that content-generated revenues are split more evenly across the site and individual creators.
How Does OMNI Compare with TikTok and Instagram?
This earnings model will arguably afford OMNI an edge over rivals such as TikTok and Instagram. So, while users across all three sites can publish and monetise content, creators can stand to earn more through the OMNI platform.
If OMNI delivers on it’s promise, we can see it becoming a much more viable side hustle than existing social media platforms.
OMNI has also stolen a march over Instagram in the field of IGTV content. Instagram failed in its efforts to implement IGTV, which would have allowed users to create channels and upload videos of between 15 seconds and 10 minutes in length.
This would have allowed for greater flexibility when publishing short and long-form content, but Instagram’s efforts failed largely as a result of poor access, a lack of navigability and the absence of monetisation.
OMNI has already excelled in this regard, enabling it to make an immediate impact in the sector and compete with Instagram on a relatively even footing. Instagram is also considered to be a so-called “pay-to-play” platform, making it hard (or should we say impossible) for creators to optimise their organic reach.
The same cannot be said for TikTok, with the latter app averaging 118% organic reach for brands on average and leading the market in this respect. This earmarks TikTok as a more serious competitor to OMNI in the content creation space, shifting the landscape of the market considerably in the process.
OMNI Success – Time Will Tell
Of course, both sites are also free-to-access and multi-purpose by nature, although TikTok has a considerable advantage as the first to market out of the two.
This means that it will take time for OMNI to emulate TikTok’s reputation among creators and achieve a similar organic reach, although the platform’s decentralised nature and ecommerce marketplace will help to bridge this gap in the near-term.
At the time of writing OMNI app is still in development, we are not sure how many of the announced features will be available. From what we have seen so far, it does look promising.
