Instagram Reels have “a lot of catching up to do”
Instagram Reels are the Meta subsidiary’s big hope. But as can be seen from internal documents, Instagram is lagging behind with its short video format competitor TikTok.
Instagram is struggling with the success of competing platform TikTok. The Meta subsidiary keeps tweaking the feed and algorithm to keep up with the popular short video app.
But the former photo platform apparently doesn’t do that very well, as the Wall Street Journal reported. The newspaper has looked at internal documents and sees a “great need to catch up” at Meta.
Contents
What about Instagram Reels?
In August 2020, Instagram started the first tests for its short video format Reels. The format should lure users away from TikTok and towards their own platform. But according to that WSJreport does not work particularly reliably.
That’s according to the “Creators x Reels State of the Union 2022” meta-memo that the company released internally in August.
It shows the discrepancy between Instagram and TikTok. Because with Instagram Reels, users spend 17.6 million hours a day. On the other hand, TikTok users spend 197.8 million hours a day.
The document also states that Reels exposure is down 13.6% over the past four weeks. The problem: Most users would not have any Reels engagement. Because in the USA only about a fifth of the eleven million creators post.
According to meta spokesperson Devi Narasimhan, this data is outdated and not global. Reels engagement is currently increasing month by month. According to the, she has more current figures WSJ but do not want to deliver.
Creatives and businesses are seeing promising results, and our monetization growth is faster than we anticipated with more people viewing, creating, and connecting with Reels than ever before.
The problem with content from other platforms
Instagram only announced in April that it would give more preference to original content. Content that users have created on TikTok, for example, has been ranked lower since then.
The platform wants to create an incentive for content to be created directly for Instagram. But the internal memo now shows that almost a third of all Instagram Reels are previously created on another platform. These are usually recognizable by a watermark.
Instagram is struggling with the competition from TikTok
Not even two months ago, Instagram faced harsh criticism from its users. The problem was a change in the Instagram feed that made the community feel too reminiscent of TikTok.
Especially the call of the photographer @illuminati hit high waves. In a post, she demanded that Instagram stop trying to be like TikTok. Celebrities like Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian also shared this call.
After this wave of displeasure, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri had to backtrack. In an interview with The Verge he finally announced that he wanted to undo the feed changes.
Also interesting:
