Reels is here to rival TikTok
Before a lot of us even got our heads around what TikTok is, Instagram has come out to reveal a new video mode on the Stories function that looks very familiar.
Reels is a new swipe option on Instagram Stories that allows users to create videos with added features such as choosing a background song, or using a rewind or fast forward function to jazz the clip up a bit.
The advantage for Instagram here is that Reels is within the app and doesn’t require another one to be installed, like with Threads and IGTV. In particular, this may drag some TikTok users away from having both apps when they would likely already have Instagram.
TikTok launched “for creating and sharing short lip-sync, comedy, and talent videos”. Most interestingly, the app was created by a Chinese company, although marketed to non-Chinese markets.
The company, Beijing ByteDance have recently acquired American app, Musical.ly, which was very similar in its purpose to TikTok. Think back to the Dubsmash trend where users could lip sync over lyrics or key quotes from pop culture. It seems as though the ideas of Musical.ly and the company’s desires to create TikTok merged to create a single app— Musical.ly no longer exists as it has been renamed and rejigged as TikTok. Following?!
Only in the past couple of months has TikTok been deemed a potential threat to Instagram with reports that a lot of users preferred the app over Instagram entirely, despite Instagram’s efforts with the launch of Threads.
Facebook, Instagram’s owner, has been pretty blatant about their recent developments in order to keep up with competitors. Instagram’s Director of Product Management Robby Stein was quoted in a recent article saying "I think Musically before TikTok, and TikTok deserve a ton of credit for popularising this format.”
Instagram continues to sneakily make subtle changes to their app without too much publicity. It garners more of a surprise reaction: the Explore tab was cleaned up, the what-your-followers-have-liked Likes tab has been taken off also. In Stories, the Create tab now allows users to have an entire segment for a Poll, Question or Countdown so it is doesn’t appear as a sticker.
Having Reels in-app will mean that technically, the new addition already will far surpass TikTok in usage. There are 500 million active users on Instagram, and while Reels has only been launched in Brazil so far, the percentage of users who will at least trial Reels if not regularly use it will be significant.
After every new development, we find ourselves asking: do we even need this? Time will tell once Reels reaches Australian smartphones.