When TikTok was banned in India last June, Instagram jumped on the short video bandwagon very quickly and launched Reels. The company rolled out the feature globally in August 2020.
Now, its parent company Facebook is integrating Reels in the blue app. The firm is testing the feature in India by giving access to select creators to share Reels they created on Instagram to the Facebook app. If they share the short video, it’ll have their Instagram handle attached to it.
Plus, these users will also get the ability to create short videos using Facebook’s own tools.
While this is in a test phase right now, Zuckerberg & Co. will expectedly release this to the world this year. They would want to do this for two reasons.
First, in India, domestic players such as MX Takatak and ShareChat’s Moj have captured a large number of users.
While Instagram has around 165 million monthly active users in the country, Facebook has more than 350 million active monthly users on its platform. This gives creators direct access to a much larger audience without having to take too much effort.
On the global front, TikTok is still the biggest player in the short videos space. This cross-sharing feature will potentially lure some big-name creators to Facebook’s platform for short video content.
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Published March 9, 2021 — 10:42 UTC