In a blog post on Thursday, meta said that it was launching new creator tools on instagram and Facebook for its tiktok competitor reels worldwide. These new tools will make it easier for creators to skip using tiktok to edit short films, and help encourage people to use reels to create original content, which is what the instagram team hopes to happen.
Instagram reels now allows users to import their own audio (at least 5 seconds long) from camera film into their reel video. The scroll now supports 90 second video. It is adding interactive "stickers" to support voting, quizzes and emoticons -- much like instagram stories. Instagram is also widely releasing templates, so that users can easily copy the same pattern of another scroll they see, which can speed up the pace of the memo style of viral transmission.
Following the launch of Facebook's IOS and Android apps in February, Facebook reels can now use the tools in the website "creator studio" on the PC desktop to allow users to create and edit videos on comfortable chairs. According to meta, creator studio will also make it easier to test different formats.
The creators will also be able to clip live clips into a 60 second clip format. In addition to being available on the desktop, Facebook reels also has some new audio tools, including video dubbing and a feature called soundsync, which will automatically synchronize the video with the beat of someone's selected song. Facebook reels also supports text to voice conversion in published videos.
It is not surprising that meta quickly introduced features that mimic tiktok. The company is actively trying to transform a platform that Adam moselli, the CEO of instagram, calls no longer a "square photo sharing application". However, shortly after reels was first launched on instagram in 2020, it is clear that some work needs to be done to establish a real competitor. Recently, instagram began to test NFT support in the application, full screen instagram feed, and even began to test to remove its recent tags from the tag content search.