Instagram Provides Reels Replies, Offering One other Strategy to Faucet into Brief-Type Video

It was in test for a while, but today Instagram officially announced that users can now Replying to comments with reelswhich is another way to incorporate reels into the Instagram process.

As you can see in this example, now whenever you reply to a comment on a post, you also have the option to tap the blue Reels button to create a video reply which will then be displayed as a sticker that you can can send to the commentator.

Here’s another look at the process in action (via @TheBKH):

This is another way to help Instagram increase engagement while also turning to the short video trend. Also, it’s not surprising that it’s almost identical to the same feature that TikTok added last June.

Instagram added a few new color options to the sticker, but essentially it’s the same. Which is pretty much a given given the recent history of Instagram – although Reels also lets you reply to comments on regular posts and videos, which expands the functionality a bit.

On the one hand, like all of Instagram’s copycat features, it feels a little cheap, maybe a little old-fashioned, just to recreate what TikTok is already doing.

On the other hand, it works – noted Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on company news last profit notification this is reels now “the number one driver of engagement growth” on the platform, with millions of users now interacting with Reels clips on a daily basis. If Meta can still keep a few short video fans in its apps instead of drifting them off to TikTok, that will be a win, and that alone is likely enough to warrant further copying of TikTok’s features.

But I claim that if Meta really wants to win back younger users, it has to come out with new, unique features and keep up with the latest trends. A side effect of replication is that you naturally follow someone else, and if you aren’t seen as a leader in the newest shifts, you probably aren’t the cool app and place that younger users mostly interact with.

Meta knows that, of course. In fact, it’s an important part of Facebook’s growth story – when Facebook replaced MySpace as the main social app for Mong users in 2005, it was MySpace tries to copy the main tools from Facebook, in a final attempt to contain user migration.

That clearly didn’t work, and Facebook eventually became the place that drove the company to bigger and better things.

TikTok is on a similar path, and while Meta’s family of apps is far larger than MySpace ever was, it is not unthinkable to imagine that TikTok will become the premier social app in the near future.

Meta has already said that it is focus on young users, and as part of that, it really needs to re-establish itself as a leader, not a follower of the latest trends.