REELS: INSTAGRAM'S ANSWER TO TIKTOK

10 Aug 2020

The video sharing platform known as TikTok has blown up massively recently, quickly shooting its way to the top as one of the biggest social media giants in the market today. Being unique in the industry, with its short video clip sharing content having been compared to that of what Vine once was, it was only a matter of time before the app was challenged more directly by its competitors.

Enter Reels – Instagram’s new feature set to rival that of TikTok. There is no avoiding the fact that the new feature recently introduced by the Facebook owned site has a strong resemblance to that of TikTok. Users are able to create short clips, adding a variety of songs and sounds (many of which originally became trends on TikTok) and editing features such as changing the speed and adding effects.

Once uploaded, you can either view videos by directly visiting a user’s account, and selecting the Reeks tab, or you can browse content by various creators by scrolling through the Reels feature that now appears on the search page. Viewers are able to like, comment and share Reel videos, as you are with TikTok – the creating and navigation process greatly imitates that of TikTok.

But there must be some differences between the two, right?

Whilst TikTok allows its creators to record up to 60 seconds worth of footage per video, Reels only allows up to 15 seconds of content. Whether this will change in a future update, however, is yet to be announced.

What do you think – will TikTok continue to reign high as the favourite video sharing platform of today, or will people begin to migrate over to Instagram Reels, preferring the ease of using one application for sharing both images and videos?

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