Instagram Reels, the company’s significant effort in challenging TikTok on short-form creative content, is launching globally, starting today. The feature is being made available across 50 countries, including the U.S. Reels, which has already been live in India and Brazil, is launching now in 50 countries, including the US, UK, France, Australia and Japan.
It’s not the first time Facebook has tried to emulate TikTok, but Reels might just have the best shot at actually succeeding. That’s both because it’s already built into Instagram, Facebook’s most popular app among teens, and because the social network has borrowed many of the dynamics that have made TikTok so successful in the first place.
Creating a reel is like creating a post for Instagram Stories. You can record a series of clips from Instagram’s in-app camera, complete with music and AR effects. But Reels includes more sophisticated editing tools than what’s available in Stories. For example, you can speed up or slow down your video, and there’s an align tool for TikTok-style jump cuts.
The biggest difference between Reels and Stories is the way they are shared. When you upload a reel, it’s automatically shared to the new Reels section of Explore, with the option of also posting it in your main feed. All the reels you create will also be viewable in a dedicated section of your profile, similar to IGTV posts.
One of the biggest differences between TikTok and Instagram is that on TikTok users’ main feeds are driven not by their subscriptions, but by an algorithmically-generated “For You” feed. It’s this personalized feed, filled with an endless stream of short videos, that makes TikTok so addictive. It’s also what allows such a wide variety of content to go viral.
Instagram wants to bring this dynamic to Reels. During a press event with reporters, Instagram’s VP of Product Vishal Shah emphasized that the recommendations will be separate from those that drive the rest of Explore, with a “creator-centric approach to ranking.”
“We have not historically been very good at helping new creators find an audience,” he said. “The pitch for new creators is that Reels is a way for you to get discovered. It’s a way to find a global audience.”
Overall, what Instagram has built isn’t all that differentiated from TikTok. But nor is it a direct clone.
Instead, Instagram has turned the entirety of the TikTok experience into a single feature among many others within its own app. That’s been a formula for success in the past Instagram Stories is now bigger than all of Snapchat, for instance.
TikTok’s future notwithstanding, Reels follows a familiar strategy for Instagram. Just as Facebook spent years trying to copy Snapchat before it opted to bring Stories to the top of users’ Instagram feeds, Reels borrows some of TikTok’s most important features and puts them right in the middle of Instagram. And while we don’t yet know if Reels will be anywhere near as successful as Stories has been, Instagram is making its TikTok clone impossible to ignore.
