Facebook is taking another step to incentivize users to create original content for its TikTok clone. The company introduced a “Share with Reels” feature that allows users of third-party apps to post directly to Facebook Reels.
The update allows external developers to add a “Reels button” to their apps so users can post clips directly to Reels while taking advantage of Reels’ editing tools, Facebook wrote in a post. posted on the blog. Early developers using this feature include Smule, the popular karaoke app, and video editing apps Vita and VivaVideo.
The move is another sign of the growing importance of Reels and how Facebook has attempted to borrow from the same playbook it used with Stories. Facebook pushed Reels in almost Its service in recent months resembles that of Stories, when the company sees Snapchat as its main competitor. Now, with Facebook losing users to TikTok, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is betting heavily on Reels’ success. He say that Stories will be “as important to our products as Stories” and that reorienting its service to attract younger users is the company’s “North Star”.
But getting users to post original content, rather than just extracting TikTok clips, is a challenge for the company. Instagram, which has the longest Reels, said a year ago that it would videos with watermarks from other apps, but the service is still filled with recycled TikToks. Adding a “Reels” button to other content creation apps is unlikely to solve that anytime soon, but it could help bring in some new, non-TikTok-generated clips.
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