It looks like Meta continues to focus on Reels quite firmly. Social media consultant Matt Navarra shared a screenshot on Twitter that shows a notification about an experimental Instagram feature that says all video posts will be shared as Reels in the app. This sharing status means that if your account is public, anyone can discover your video and use your original voice to create their own Reels.
If your profile is private, only your friends can see your video, but other users can still create a remix under Reels and download it as part of their remix. The only way to make sure no one uses reels for remixes seems to be to turn off the option in Settings or disable it for every video you post.
We can say that this decision is not a surprise, as TikTok-style videos are quickly becoming a popular format on both Instagram and Facebook. When Mark Zuckerberg announced the company’s fourth quarter revenue announcement for 2021, he said that Reels is now Meta’s fastest growing content format. Also, Meta chief product officer Chris Cox, in a statement recently shared with employees, described Reels as a “bright spot” for the company and warned them of “tough times” due to slowing growth. He also said that one of the projects Meta plans to focus on for the second half of 2022 is to get Reels to monetize as quickly as possible.
Judging by the disclosures, time spent watching short-form videos has more than doubled since last year, with 80 percent of the growth coming from Facebook. So it looks like the company plans to go so far as to redesign Instagram and Facebook’s homepages to better incorporate short videos. Converting all video posts to Reels will allow the company to distribute more content, which will translate into more views of the videos on the platform and greater potential advertising earnings as the format becomes monetized in the future. However, as always in such experiments, it may be useful to remind that not all experimental Instagram features are widely published, and that this feature is not certain to come.
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