inewsamerica: Will Ariana Grande, New Queen of Instagram, Change the Way We Post?

From Getty Images.

There is a lot that Selena Gomez and Ariana Grande have in common. They’re about the same age: Gomez was born in 1992, Grande in 1993. They both got their start on cable TV: Gomez on Disney Channel, Grande on Nickelodeon. They’ve both become tabloid fixtures. And they’re both currently among our most highly scrutinized pop stars.

While they both have a preposterous number of Instagram followers, Gomez has been the reigning “Queen of Instagram,” the woman on the platform with the most followers, since the end of 2016. (Soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo currently has the most of anyone, with 155 million followers.) This week, however, Grande moved past Gomez. (As of the beginning of this week, Grande has 146.44 million to Gomez’s 146.32 million.) Grande’s social-media numbers have been growing at a rapid rate over the past year, which makes sense given that she has been extremely productive, releasing two albums in the past six months, with her name appearing in the headlines almost every day. Billboard notes that she has accumulated a staggering 13 million new followers in the past four months.

Grande and Gomez, in many ways, represent the two opposite approaches to social media, both for celebrities and, uh, non-celebrities. Grande posts a lot. She has put up almost three times as many posts as Gomez has since joining the platform, and it is rare she goes a day without posting a photograph of some kind. Similarly, she posts to her Instagram Stories with abandon. You know how sometimes you’ll click on a friend’s Instagram Story and see 17 tiny dots at the top, indicating a 17-part journey of a story, and think to yourself, “Well, here we go . . .”? That’s Grande’s story pretty much every day. She posts snippets from her hangouts with her friends, rehearsals, selfies, filtered selfies, tour information, memes, and a lot more. She mixes in promotional details with personal exploits (her recent tattoo debacle played out entirely on her Instagram account, for example). Grande—who is also active on Twitter—has a natural intimacy with her fans; her posts feel conversational and spontaneous, without as much of the careful distance that can sometimes permeate celebrity behavior on social media.

Gomez, on the other hand, particularly in the last year or so, has taken a much less active approach. Wildly popular and with a massive fanbase, Gomez has, on rare occasions, experimented with a Grande-like approach to Instagram, going through brief spurts where she’ll post videos from car rides with friends or dinner parties. In September, understandably frustrated by the negative sentiments and commenter culture of Instagram, she said she was taking a break from the platform, writing, “taking a social media break. Again. As much as I am grateful for the voice that social media gives each of us, I am equally grateful to be able to step back and live my life present to the moment I have been given.” She told Elle in an October profile that she didn’t have Instagram on her phone, or the password for her account. She added, “The reason why is, it’s not real to me. I know my voice is very prominent, but I’m not careless with it. I’m selective.”

Gomez’s posts are rare at this point—and often oriented around a brand or music-related campaign—which makes them something like precious gemstones for her fans. Her three most recent posts include a shot from a Puma shoot, a slideshow of photos from her friend’s bachelorette celebration, and a tribute to friend and collaborator Julia Michaels, garnering 5.7 million, 13.9 million, and 9.9 million likes, respectively. (It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the more “personal” post, very unusual for Gomez and showing her celebrating with her friends on a beach, far outpaced the others.) Grande, who, as noted, posts much more frequently, usually gets around 1 million to 3 million likes for any given post.

In a way, their Instagram approaches reflect their recent music-release strategies. Grande has put out more music in the past six months than some stars do in six years, with two albums, both of which hit No. 1 and have spawned multiple hit singles. She recently said she wants to release music in more of a rap-music model, where she drops tracks when she feels like it, without adhering to typical regimented pop-album cycles. Gomez, who released a few winning singles in 2017 (“It Ain’t Me” and “Bad Liar” among them) and another in 2018 (“Back to You”), hasn’t released a full album since 2015. She also seems to be on her own musical path, dropping songs sporadically. Most recently, she was featured on two tracks (“Taki Taki,” alongside Cardi B, Ozuna, and DJ Snake, and Michaels’s “Anxiety”), and she is rumored to have a new single out soon with J Balvin, Tainy, Benny Blanco. As for future releases this year, we will have to wait and hear from Gomez—maybe on her Instagram . . . or maybe not.