Facebook is going to make you love its short video format called Reels,
whether you want to or not.
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The bite-size, repeating videos started on
Instagram in 2020 as an outright copy of
TikTok, the hottest app then and now.
If you haven’t noticed Reels yet, you will soon.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and
Instagram,
said last week that it would display Reels on more places in its apps. Reels
are also taking prime real estate at the top of the screen when people open the
Facebook app. Maybe soon we’ll see Reels of used cars that are listed on
Facebook’s version of Craigslist.
Shoving Reels into our eye holes is a little bit
sad, a little bit brilliant, and worth watching as a test of Facebook’s
ability to will itself into continued popularity. Leveraging success to make
further success is how dominant companies win — and it has worked for Facebook
before — but it’s also how dominant companies lose.
Facebook might be the most interesting
technology story to watch in 2022. The company could be on the cusp of the last days of an
empire or about to reinvent itself again and become even more popular and
richer.
We might not want to admit it, but the fate of
Facebook and its strategies affect us all. This company’s choices about which
features to prioritize influence how billions of people interact, the ways that
businesses reach their customers and the look and feel of the rest of the
internet.
Reels is an essential part of Facebook’s strategy to
head off the company’s worst fears about losing its appeal to young people and
shriveling into irrelevance. Facebook wants some of that TikTok coolness, and
it made its own version of that app for Instagram.
It’s not clear if Reels is a particularly effective
copycat of TikTok, but it might not matter.
Facebook has said that Reels is catching on and that
people using its apps are increasing the time they spend with the videos more
than almost anything else. The company expanded Reels from Instagram to the
Facebook app and now into more spots in those apps and in more countries. The
company is also experimenting with financial incentives to compel more
professional internet entertainers to make Reels.
We can’t really know for sure how popular Reels are
or why. Are people latching on to Reels because they like them, or because
they’re just there? Google said recently that videos from its own version of
TikTok,
YouTube Shorts, are viewed 15 billion times each day. The number is so
big that I didn’t believe it at first, but I should have. Google has billions
of users, and that is a valuable asset to grab attention for new things.
Maybe Facebook’s versions of TikTok, Zoom, or
Nextdoor are not great, but the company has many ways to nudge the billions of
people using its apps to try them. The company can see what people seem to like
and don’t, tinker, and keep making a new product better — and unavoidable —
until it takes hold.
That’s pretty much what Facebook did about five
years ago with Stories, its copycat of the most popular feature on
Snapchat. Facebook
experimented with the video-and-photo chronicles of people’s days on Instagram
and made them prominent in the company’s apps, and then they won.
The playbook for Reels seems almost identical, and
Facebook executives have essentially said to investors: Hey, we made Stories
catch on and we’ll do it with Reels, too. Putting its muscle behind new
products isn’t foolproof for Facebook. This isn’t even the company’s first try
at copying TikTok.
Following other tech companies’ leads doesn’t make
Facebook seem inventive, although it might not matter. The history of Silicon
Valley is marked by companies that didn’t necessarily make a product first or
best but made it the biggest.
But the recent rise of younger companies like TikTok
and the
e-commerce star Shopify may be evidence that inventive upstarts can
take advantage of lumbering tech superpowers.
That’s what makes Facebook so compelling to watch. A Big
Tech superpower may be putting all its muscle into staying on top, or it might
be withering in front of us.
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