Instagram Reels Is Not a TikTok Killer
Because it completely misses the mark on what makes TikTok so popular
Note: I can only comment on Instagram’s battle with “Straight TikTok”, as I’m not involved in the Alt TikTok communities
Facebook made waves last month by announcing Instagram Reels, a new short video feature on Instagram in a response to TikTok’s explosion of growth during COVID lockdown.
Like Instagram Stories for Snapchat, Instagram Reels is a direct copycat of TikTok in an effort to capitalize on its recent momentum.
And Zuckerberg is not shy about admitting to copying competitors to stay ahead of innovation, claiming that it was well within the rules of capitalism.
A Chinese venture capitalist called Facebook “the most Chinese company in Silicon Valley”, referencing China’s recent practice of directly copying apps from Western tech companies.
Instagram Reels (along with Stories before it) leaves a sour taste on my mouth. It goes against my value of “fairness”; it seems unfair that Zuckerberg can copy competitors and steal their thunder.
Unfortunately, history has rewarded Facebook for their underhanded tactics.
Four years since the launch of Instagram Stories, the feature has been widely regarded as a huge success. It allowed Instagram to expand beyond its core value proposition of curated feeds, and offered users a venue to post carefree, unstructured (and therefore, more intimate and vulnerable) content in an ephemeral format. It allowed Instagram to retain its teen users, who were leaving in droves for more fun apps before the feature launch.
While Stories initially didn’t steal away Snapchat’s core user base, the new feature gave Instagram’s millions of users a taste of Snapchat’s key functionality and deterred them from downloading Snapchat. Thus, Snapchat’s growth was halted significantly, as the app couldn’t expand into a mainstream user base (i.e., the people who use Instagram).
In fact, Facebook’s ripoff was so egregious and so successful that Snapchat is working with FTC antitrust regulators on allegations against Facebook.
However, I don’t think Facebook will be successful this time around with Instagram Reels.
And I can say that with confidence because Facebook has completely missed the reason why TikTok has become so popular.
It’s the same reason why Snapchat became so popular nearly a decade ago.
TikTok and Snapchat allow us to express ourselves and connect with others more authentically than Instagram.
On Snapchat, we can send ugly selfies and blurry videos of the inside of dark clubs. We don’t care about adding filters or fixing the composition because we know that will disappear. And because we don’t care, we don’t try so hard to curate and project an image of our lives to our friends. We’re just us.
And what made Instagram Stories so successful was that it didn’t just augment Instagram’s existing value proposition, it expanded it. Like Snapchat, it allowed us to be unfiltered and post more — showing our authentic selves.
And Instagram Stories won us over because it took what Snapchat did well and made it even better by allowing us to express ourselves even more and further connect to each other:
- Adding more recording tools (e.g., Boomerang, ‘which ___ are you?’ filters)
- Building an API to connect to other popular apps (e.g., Spotify song sharing)
- Offering more dialogue between creators and viewers of Stories (e.g., Polls, AMAs)
I can’t recount all the great conversations I’ve had from someone replying to a song that I shared on my Story with their reactions to an artist, or replying to a thought-provoking Poll that I had shared. These features let me connect to my followers (and I to them) more than a simple post.
Snapchat saw this happening and tried to double down on its existing bets: beefing up 3D filters and location-based stories. But those features didn’t foster the same sense of connectivity as those on Instagram.
On TikTok, it’s the same thing but in a different way. There’s still an element of curation to TikTok (and plenty of filters), but the authenticity that TikTok allows us to show is our ability to be goofy and have fun. There are no stoic pouts on TikTok, or a curated snapshot in time. It’s a 10-second video of us sweating from dancing or laughing from a funny challenge.
Yet when I scroll through Instagram Reels, I don’t see a TikTok copycat. I don’t see everyday people sharing their thoughts on anti-racism, or participating in a challenge with a random soundbite, or attempting to dance to Megan Thee Stallion.
Instead, I see influencers promoting their workouts, showing off their outfits, bragging about their travels, flexing on their followers.
I see Instagram in video form.
And then I look at my profile and debate if I should post a Reel too. But I don’t have anything interesting to brag about. And then I go onto my friends’ profiles and see that they also haven’t posted any Reels. So I ask, what’s the point of posting a Reel?
So if Facebook wants Instagram Reels to be the next Stories, they have to run the exact same playbook as Stories.
You can’t just copy the UI, you have to copy the value proposition too.
Why TikTok is so damn good at fostering participation and connection
TikTok is great because it stands on the shoulders of giants. TikTok wasn’t the first foray into short-form video sharing. Vine and Musical.ly walked, so that TikTok could run.
Vine was amazing because it created a strong creator class that produced high content videos. It proved to be a great format that sparked viral memes throughout the internet. However, it failed because while it celebrated its creator class, it set up a high barrier for viewers to create their own content (amongst other factors like management turnover, lack of monetization strategy as a company and for its creators).
So Vine had great content that was only being produced by a small number of creators. It looked more like a media company than a social app. Users enjoyed watching and sharing videos outside of the app, but they didn’t stay logged on for long because there was no community to participate in.
Musical.ly was great because it lowered the barrier for anyone to make content. It provided easy-to-use tools for users to record themselves dancing along to popular songs and to share with friends, urging them to recording themselves dancing along as well.
This fostered the sense of user-driven community that Vine lacked. And a small creator class of dancers emerged as well. However, it was dedicated to the dancing/music use case, which limited its growth potential.
In summary, Vine was great to view content but not to create content, while Musical.ly was great to create content but lacked the same breadth of content for viewing (especially comedy/memes) as Vine.
What they both had were avid fanbases and the uncanny ability to create viral content (Google ‘vine compilation youtube’ or ‘musically compilation youtube’ and see how many views and videos you’ll get)
TikTok parent company ByteDance saw Musical.ly’s success and acquired the platform in 2018. They also observed Vine’s failings and sought to remediate them. As a result, they created an app that combined the magic of Vine and Musical.ly — an app that is laser focused on effortless content creation and content participation.
And what was its killer use case? Challenges.
TikTok made it as easy as possible to view (through a high-powered feed algorithm) and to participate in challenges (more on this later).
What are challenges?
Challenges are activities that are built around sharing to generate virality. Challenges are not a new concept; they’ve been around since 2015 (with the ALS ice bucket challenge), since 2008 (with the ‘tag a friend’ Facebook photos in the early platform days), and probably way before those.
What makes TikTok unique is that it’s an app built specifically around challenges.
Recall doing the ALS ice bucket challenge:
- You had to hear from your friend that you’ve been nominated, or maybe you got a notification from being tagged on Facebook
- Then you recorded yourself pouring ice cold water on yourself — probably on your smartphone
- Then you realized that you recorded too much at the beginning and wanted to make it shorter. Or maybe you wanted to add music in the background. So you transfer your video on your phone to your laptop. There, you edit the video on iMovie or Adobe Premiere
- Then you make a YouTube account and upload the video
- Finally you share it on Facebook and tag your friends that you nominated
Now imagine doing that in one app in less than 5 minutes. And imagine that you have hundreds of challenges to choose from.
That’s TikTok.
Viewing challenges is easy as hell
For the sake of brevity, I’ll double click on 3 features that make viewing challenges effortless on TikTok, and I’ll contrast with Instagram Reels:
- The optimized “homepage” and the algorithm
- Readily-available “sounds” to use
- The Discover page
The user interface of the homepage, called the “For You Page” or “fyp”, is optimized for a best-in-class mobile viewing experience. When you open the app, you are greeted with a vertical video that covers the entire length of your smartphone screen.
The UI is minimal and stripped down to the bare necessities (e.g., comment, share, like, profile, nav bar, sound [more on this later]).
And enough can’t be said about TikTok’s infamous content algorithm. From my experience, the algorithm always pushes me the most addictive content to consume — usually revolving around the most popular challenges at the moment.
While Instagram Reels has a comparable UI to that of TikTok, it’s not on the homepage. Instead, it’s in the Discover page, and a user needs to click three times before entering the fullscreen Reels feed.
Reels needs to compete with the main feed, Stories, IGTV, and Instagram Shop for real estate on the Discover page, which makes it a stressful and bloated experience for a user.
The jury is still out on Instagram Reel’s algorithm. I imagine it’s built on the backbone of the core content algo and will improve over time. I personally found the Reels algo to suggest less interesting content, but that may be conflated with the fact that the Reels content spurs less connectivity and participation.
I think the most distinctive and powerful feature on TikTok is the decoupling of videos from “sounds”. On TikTok, videos don’t have to be connected to sounds; this makes it easy for someone else to take a sound make it a challenge.
An easy example to grok is a popular song like Relationship by Young Thug, which has a TikTok dance challenge. It’d be easy to reuse the same song snippet as everyone else in order to post your attempt at the dance challenge.
A more advanced application of a sound would be the “I’m Asian Check” challenge where the voice of a random guy is used as a narrator.
TikTok elevates this feature by prominently highlighting it in the video UI: it’s placed in the bottom-right corner, with a spinning photo icon, with a small musical note animation.
Your eyes are literally drawn to it!
Once the icon is clicked, you’ll be taken to screen that shows the most popular videos that use that sound. You can also use the sound for your own video, or save it for later.
This screen makes it incredibly easy to browse challenges that use the same sound. I’ve personally wasted dozens of hours browsing this page!
Instagram Reels also has this feature, but it’s been executed poorly. Too often, a video will be an “Original Audio” tag instead of the popular song/sound that the video was meant to use.
This leads to a dearth of other videos when you click on the sound icon, giving the appearance that no one is participating in this challenge and making it harder for a user to see other challenge submissions.
Lastly, TikTok’s Discover page is entirely dedicated to trending challenges. Instagram Reels has no feature anywhere on its page.
TikTok’s viewer experience is best-in-class because it’s hyper-focused on optimizing for its short video format, whereas Instagram cannot compete because it is bloated with its other features.
Participating in challenges is even easier than viewing
Like with TikTok’s viewing experience, I’m going to deep dive into 3 creator features that make it so easy to contribute to challenges:
0. Adding sounds to video (listed as #0 because I’m not going to talk about it anymore than I already have in the last section, but it’s a great feature to start participating in challenges)
- The algorithm and fyp
- “Duets” to tag-team challenges with friends
- “Effects” to spur new challenges
When joining a new social media platform, the biggest barrier to posting content is knowing that you don’t have the ability to reach many people. So you ask yourself, why should I tweet if no one will read it?
Why should I upload to YouTube if I won’t get any views? Post on Instagram if I won’t get any likes? Share on Facebook if I don’t have any friends?
The same goes with a new user on TikTok. But TikTok remediates this concern with its algorithm. The algorithm can suggest anyone’s content onto the fyp regardless of follower count, so anyone can instantly become viral.
It’s not uncommon to see TikTok profiles that have 1–2 videos that have amassed millions of views, while the rest are in the 1000s.
By limiting this concern, users are more willing to create, knowing that there’s a chance that millions of people will see their content. And once a user’s video makes it big on the fyp, he/she keeps chasing the dragon and posting more videos in hopes of getting featured on fyp again.
This is a huge contrast to Instagram’s Discover page, which rewards accounts with high follower counts.
Putting aside virality and the chance of “making it big”, TikTok is still fun for users to simply make content for themselves and their friends.
And the only thing better than making content for friends is making content with friends. “Duets” is a great way for friends to tag-team challenges.
A Duet is a split screen feature on TikTok that allows users to create content alongside an existing video. It’s popularly used to do side-by-side challenges with friends and even famous influencers on TikTok.
This fosters an even greater sense of connection between TikTok users, as they are all participating in the same challenges and are even sharing the same video screens as other users. The Duet format can also be used as a blank canvas for more interesting challenges (more on this later).
It’s the ALS ice bucket challenge all over, only this time we can do a split screen mode.
Instagram Reels currently does not have this feature.
Lastly, TikTok continues to add more “Effects” to the app, which (like Polls, “Which ____ Am I?”, and other stickers on Instagram Stories) increases the surface area of challenges that users can participate in.
These “Effects” are essentially filters that you can add to your video that can be used for humor and can be used for challenges.
Take the Green Screen effect in the Sugar Daddy Challenge, for example. The Green Screen effect can change the age of a person in a photo (among other things) so that they look much older. In the Sugar Daddy Challenge, young women are using this effect to make their similarly-aged boyfriends look like grandpas.
I think it’s safe to say that Instagram Reels has none of this cool effects.
Note: I don’t condone this challenge at all and personally find it really weird.
In Summary
TikTok does so many amazing things in order to make viewing and creating content easy on its platform. It highlights challenges as its star use case, allowing people to easily become stars — or at the very least connect to other people on the app.
But ultimately, it’s not the delightful features that make TikTok successful. It’s not the algorithm, and it’s not even ByteDance’s razor-sharp product focus on short videos for a young user base.
TikTok has found so much success because of the sense of togetherness that it brings when we go on its platform.
When we view and partake in TikTok’s challenges, we’re making real connections with one another. We dance the same dances, coo at the same cute puppies, and laugh at the same dumb jokes.
There’s a reason why TikTok is the driving force behind today’s Top 40 pop songs. Because when we listen to those songs, we see the challenges that are connected to them, and we feel the camaraderie that those challenges give us.
And especially during this tumultuous COVID times, when we’re all feeling extra isolated from the world, we know that we can come together online.
Sadly, with Reels, I don’t feel a sense of connection at all.
So sorry, Zuck. Reels will not be the TikTok killer.
