After several months of testing in France, Germany and around fifty countries, Facebook officially announces this Wednesday the launch of Reels, an integrated feature on Instagram that allows you to edit and publish short music videos. They will be visible in the Explore tab of the social network, a personalized feed where users can browse through the most popular content.
The concept is very close to TikTok, the successful application of Chinese ByteDance which has nearly a billion users worldwide. In use, the resemblance is obvious. Same vertical scrolling, same looping and same mosaic of videos on user profiles. Instagram has also adopted the principle of algorithmic suggestions from its competitor, which offers relevant content to users according to their presumed tastes.
This similarity with TikTok is assumed by the company of Mark Zuckerberg. " We weren't the first to create news feeds, we weren't the first to create Stories, we are definitely not the first to create short videos ," the product director said in June. from Instagram, Vishal Shah, to AFP.
Reels isn't Facebook's first TikTok clone, either. In July, the company discontinued Lasso, another short video app that launched in late 2018 in the United States and South America. It had only been downloaded 10.5 million times since its launch, compared to TikTok's 2 billion. This time around, Facebook believes it has the recipe for success, which could be facilitated by the fact that Reels is integrated with Instagram, an app that has around one billion users worldwide.
Sense of timing
The global launch of Reels also comes at a particularly auspicious time, since its competitor TikTok is now threatened with a ban in the United States. Suspected of espionage by Donald Trump and several official institutions, ByteDance will probably have to separate from its American activity. An uncertainty that could encourage some of its users to switch to a more sustainable platform. Reels is therefore timely.
Facebook has a sense of timing. The day after TikTok was banned in India, following a border dispute with China, the social network immediately launched Reels there in the test phase.
It remains to be seen whether users will adopt this new tool globally. The profile and in particular the age of TikTok users (often young) being different from those of Instagram users, their demands in terms of content are not the same. But for creators, the arrival of a new platform always represents an opportunity. “ The arrival of Reels is interesting for creators because they can reach more people with the same content. And the same account can reach a wider audience on a given platform, by multiplying the formats, ”analyzes an expert in the sector.
