With TikTok taking the world by storm and Facebook’s competitor Lasso failing dismally, the social media giant is to throw money at the problem. Since there are very few differentiating features among the various platforms these days, Facebook won’t be able to gain the market share they desire through unique, innovative features.
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According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook will lure some of the biggest TikTok stars to their new Reels platform on Instagram. Mark Zuckerberg is setting some money aside in order to make Reels a viable competitor to the ever growing TikTok.
Reels, which has been launched in Brazil, France and Germany to test out the performance of the platform, is expected to debut in the US soon (within a matter of weeks). If they are able to lure a couple of big, famous TikTok creators to launch the platform in the States it could help the take-up rate immensely.
To combat this, TikTok has created a $200 million fund to keep creators on their own platform. To be eligible for this money, though, the creators have to abide by some conditions which may be prohibitive. These conditions include stipulations like a minimum age, numbers of posts per week, and so on. Of course, Facebook has heaps of money it could burn in this mission, which TikTok can’t compete with. It is a strategy that Microsoft applied to grow Mixer in an attempt to take on Twitch, and we all know how that turned out.
According to the WSJ report, Facebook will also have conditions of eligibility. Facebook, or rather Instagram, wants either exclusivity, or for Reels to be the first place new social clips are posted. An additional draw is that Facebook will allocate some of that money to bankroll the production of these clips.
Do you use TikTok? Are you excited for Instagram to launch a competing service? Let us know in the comments below.
