You might have seen more short-form videos appear on your Instagram feed lately, including Reels: an integrated way to share short video content to your Instagram followers. While the feature was trialled in a few key countries in 2019 (we covered this here), it’s now been rolled out in full to 50 including Australia.

This isn’t the first time Instagram has attempted to rival other video based social apps. Two years ago they launched Lasso, a stand-alone app which allowed users to upload short videos with music and find trending content. It was launched just two months after Tik Tok merged with Musical.ly, an attempt at being a direct competitor. However, over the last two years, Lasso hasn’t garnered the same interest as Tik Tok, with just 600,000 downloads in America versus Tik Tok’s 130 million. The app was recently shutdown to make way for the integrated Reels platform, now accessible through the Instagram app.

So what are the differences between arguably the most popular video-based social app Tik Tok and Reels, given that they both specialise in short-form video content?

1. Brand identity

The primary difference between the two apps is that they’re owned by separate companies in two different countries. ByteDance owns Tik Tok which is based out of China, while Facebook owns Instagram (and thus the Reels feature), based out of America.

While Facebook has been out of the spotlight in 2020, Tik Tok has been banned in India and has caused recent controversy in the US. The app has come under fire in the last eight weeks by the US Administration for its privacy policy that states the company reserves the right to share user’s information to other members of its corporate group. This includes parent company ByteDance which could then technically pass information onto the Chinese Government.

Amidst this drama, Instagram released the Reels feature at the start of August around the world, ensuring there is an alternative for users who may have privacy concerns or who don’t have access to Tik Tok. This may be the case for America soon, which currently accounts for 130 million users on Instagram. These people may turn to Reels for their short-form content fix when there isn’t a strong alternative.

2. Video length

Earlier this year Tik Tok extended the length of its videos from 15 to 60 seconds which has broadened the appeal and creativity on the platform. Meanwhile, Reels only currently allows 15 second videos to be published to Instagram.

While this won’t cause much of an issue for many users, 60 seconds gives brands and influencer partners more of an opportunity to feature collaborations. Will brands be inclined to partner with influencers when they only have 15 seconds to get their message across? Time will tell.

3. Demographics

While Tik Tok’s audience has primarily been Gen Z with 69% of all users being between 13-24 years old, this demographic has been declining and making room for more Millennials (24-34). However, Millennials already make up the majority of Instagram’s worldwide audience with 33.8%, which means they may have a head start in getting this age group on board and interested in short-form content.

4. Functionality

While Tik Tok is renowned for its superior in-app editing capabilities, Reels has not been able to match this yet as it only allows the addition of filters and music.

Tik Tok provides song recommendations and automatic clip trimming, utilising artificial intelligence to make editing fast, easy and effective. Like Internet Culture Writer from the New York Times, Taylor Lorenz, says…

“TikTok is better in a million ways. The main one being that TikTok removes all of the friction that normally comes with trying to make a good video.

On TikTok, you can just grab a ton of videos (like, hit select on 17 different videos of all different lengths), and dump them all into the app and hit a button. TikTok will automatically select highlights from your videos and edit them in a way to match the beat of whatever sound you choose. This makes it so easy to create a really engaging, smooth video in under 10 seconds from a ton of footage.”

Having given Reels a go myself, I have found that I have to use a seperate video editing app to make a Reel as engaging as one on Tik Tok.

We’ll be waiting on new functionality releases for Reels in the coming months. We’re interested to see the uptake in the content locally and will be monitoring best practice across the FMCG, Automotive and Beauty spaces.

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