Instagram Announces Valentine’s Day Live-Stream Shopping Event, the Latest in its eCommerce Push

Instagram’s taking another step in its growing eCommerce push with a new Valentine’s Day live-stream shopping event, featuring a range of platform influencers and brands.

As explained by Instagram:

“After the year we had, this Valentine’s Day is the perfect excuse to treat yourself and your loved ones to your favorite beauty, food, home and accessories brands – join us for a live shopping event, and explore our hand-picked collections of the hottest gifts trending on Instagram.”

As you can see in the post above, the main shopping stream will be hosted by Paige DeSorbo, who has 658k followers in the app. DeSorbo also hosts weekly fashion streams on Amazon Live, so she’s an experienced presence, which will help Instagram maximize its Valentine’s Day shopping push.

DeSorbo will also be joined by Celebrity stylist and reality star Brad Goreski (787k followers), Makeup artist Kelli Anne (128k), Reality stars Uche Nwosu (247k) and Clinton Moxam (409k) and more.

The event will essentially act as a showcase for Instagram’s evolving live shopping tools, which it’s hoping to use as a lure to get more creators posting to its app, as opposed to TikTok, by offering greater reach and monetization potential, along with increased exposure.

TikTok is also developing its own live-stream shopping strategy, while it’s also making a bigger promotional push on its Creator Marketplace as a means to help brands connect with platform influencers for campaigns. It’s a key element, because right now, both Meta (via Instagram and Facebook) and YouTube offer more earnings potential for creators, which could eventually see more of them abandon TikTok for greener pastures, if TikTok isn’t able to keep pace.

But then again, with TikTok now on track to surpass 1.5 billion users in 2022, it also has a strong claim for audience reach and exposure potential. Which element is more valuable will come down to the individual, but the race is definitely on to develop the best live-stream commerce tools to maximize each app’s respective opportunities.

In addition to its live-stream event, Instagram will also be promoting individual product collections from each of its featured influencers on the Shop tab, another sweetener in its creator promotion package.

It’s interesting to see how Instagram’s looking to evolve its shopping options, and change user behaviors, in addition to competing with other apps. Meta will be hoping that by offering more monetization tools, that will put more pressure onto TikTok, which could force it into missteps – and with TikTok already coming under creator scrutiny over its funding models, it does seem like it will have to revise its approach, or it’ll risk losing some of its audience.

Can TikTok hold on to its most influential stars as other apps offer better monetization tools? And if it can’t, will that eventually become an existential threat for the app?

You can watch Instagram’s Valentine’s Day shopping stream on February 14th at 2pm PT/5pm ET via @paige_desorbo or the Live button at the top of the Shop Tab in the app.