In 2021, Justina sharp, 24, received a call from instagram. On the phone, instagram employees invited her to talk about how to expand the influence of social media Although his intuition was strange, sharp kept his appointment.
During the half-hour meeting, instagram employees taught her how to use topic words and choose the best time to post posts to get traffic. In sharp's view, these are things that novices "can start in five seconds".
At the end of the conversation, the other party said that sharp had better post all the content on instagram if it wanted to be popular on social media.
Then it dawned on her.
"So you don't want me to send videos on tiktok!" Sharp blurted out.
Instagram's idea is very simple. Creators should send short videos to reels.
Source: screenshot of Bloomberg Report
This is the scene described by Bloomberg at the beginning of its latest report.
Reels is a short video application launched by meta, the parent company of instagram. According to the article, in the eyes of many people, it is a fake version of tiktok.
Meta hopes that creators can settle in reels in large numbers and gradually abandon tiktok, so that young people are attracted to instagram and Facebook.
Tiktok, with its rapid development momentum, has hurt meta's eyes, and 2022 is a bad start for meta.
According to this report, at the beginning of the year, the daily living users of meta's core product Facebook experienced a historic decline. Investors who were not optimistic about the company's future prospects fled in a hurry, and meta's share price continued to plummet, down 47% from last year's high.
On May 23, meta CEO Zuckerberg was indicted by Carl Racine, the Attorney General of Washington, D.C. Rahim said that Facebook was suspected of leaking users' privacy and data, and Zuckerberg was deeply involved in it. Affected by this, meta's share price plummeted more than 7% after the U.S. stock market closed on Monday.
In order to reverse the decline, Zuckerberg pinned his hopes on plagiarizing tiktok.
Under the dangerous wall, meta pushed reels
Meta owns Facebook, instagram, WhatsApp and other top social platforms, including nearly 3.6 billion users worldwide. It is not difficult for it to quickly promote new products. At present, reels has appeared on the information flow page of almost every instagam user. As long as the user clicks reels, he will enter the full screen sliding up and down video brushing mode. 15 second short video, support to add background music, with its own filter and special effects, looks exactly like tiktok.
However, drawing tiger's skin is difficult to draw bone. Instagram executives want more than "similar to" tiktok. They hope to learn tiktok's "spirit" - copy tiktok's creator culture, so that creators can make more money in meta's social matrix.
Asad awan, the head of reels' commercialization, was quoted as saying: "we have launched the reels bonus incentive plan. All invited creators can get higher incentives as long as the video is played more frequently."
Zuckerberg hopes that reels will be favored by advertisers. However, at present, the global supply chain is tight, inflation in the United States is soaring, and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine has triggered the Federal Reserve to continue to shrink its table and raise interest rates. Advertisers are not in the mood to test reels with Zuckerberg.
Instagram has a headache how to save the Creator
Sharp, mentioned at the beginning of this report, has always considered himself the online celebrity of tiktok.
"I have more fans on tiktok and earn more money. Although I started playing instagram at the age of 13, I have deeper feelings for tiktok," sharp told Bloomberg weekly. She basically has no feelings for instagram and less for reels. "Reels is a naked tool used by meta to seize the market. They didn't spend much effort on improving reels.".
The report also interviewed many creators who felt the same way. Chris equal experienced "overnight success" in tiktok in April, 2020.
Trapped at home due to the epidemic, the bored Chris made a short video of the daily lives of the two Koki and posted it on instagram and tiktok.
That night, his mobile phone frequently sounded vibration prompts, almost all from tiktok. Within 20 minutes after the release of his adorable video, it was played nearly 250000 times on tiktok.
"I didn't know tiktok had such a great magic power," Chris still felt incredible when he recalled his popular experience. "Tiktok is the best platform for ordinary people to get attention," he commented to the author in the article.
In contrast, instagram seems inferior in terms of making popular models.
Recently, instagram has also reported that it is testing its ability to spread popular money. Tessa Lyons, instagram's product director, introduced to the outside world: "in order to find out what the popular popular popular model is, we will test some content to see if it can resonate. For example, if kerky's video performs well in the first round of communication, instagram's algorithm will recommend it to the second round of communication. Each round of this video will contact more users.".
Ideally, instagram can create a popular product in this way.
However, there are not a few big V's with tens of millions of instagram fans, and few creators can start from scratch and join them step by step. According to the report, instagram's top priority is to prove to the creators that instagram is a place where ordinary people can get attention and continue to cultivate.
In order to attract the attention of young people, instagram has also launched various new functions and playing methods. However, the report quoted Sharp's observation that only reels has been favored by instagram algorithm. "Fans can't see my home page, nor can they see my instagram stories. Now it's only reels," she said.
Instagram's advice: you need to contribute more.