Should marketers bother with Instagram Reels?

Brands have nev­er had more ways to con­nect with the pub­lic. From tele­vi­sion adverts to phys­i­cal bill­boards, news­pa­per adver­tis­ing, and the pletho­ra of social media and online chan­nels, the oppor­tu­ni­ties are seem­ing­ly end­less. How­ev­er, pick­ing the right plat­form can be tricky for mar­keters.

One of the newest, fastest-ris­ing plat­forms is Chi­nese-owned Tik­Tok. But bat­tered by neg­a­tive head­lines and fac­ing the threat of a ban in the Unit­ed States, some com­pa­nies are look­ing at com­peti­tors, includ­ing Insta­gram Reels, which launched this sum­mer.

The two apps are func­tion­al­ly very sim­i­lar, but do they offer the same sorts of returns for com­pa­nies look­ing to reach cus­tomers? When weigh­ing up Reels ver­sus Tik­Tok, which one comes out on top?

“The launch of Reels in August was a long-await­ed, excit­ing devel­op­ment for Insta­gram in its pur­suit of becom­ing a one-stop shop for any social media user’s needs,” says Mary Keane-Daw­son, group chief exec­u­tive of Taku­mi, an influ­encer mar­ket­ing firm.

But she’s cir­cum­spect that Facebook’s Insta­gram Reels will sup­plant Tik­Tok, the short-form video app owned by Chi­nese par­ent com­pa­ny ByteDance, any­time soon.

“Any­one mak­ing that pre­dic­tion needs to remem­ber that Instagram’s plat­form is pop­u­lat­ed by an entire­ly dif­fer­ent user base who have inter­ests that may not align with TikTok’s,” she says. “There­fore, the type of con­tent that will like­ly dom­i­nate Reels will be dis­sim­i­lar to the trend­set­ting, cre­ative, spon­ta­neous videos that made Tik­Tok the world’s most down­loaded non-gam­ing app.”

The fight for short-form video supremacy

Tik­Tok and Insta­gram have both come to dom­i­nate the world of short-form video in a very short time. Insta­gram users love the app’s clean, ide­al­is­tic aes­thet­ic, cre­at­ing con­tent found through the Explore tab and lap­ping up sun-kissed pho­tographs and videos both through the main feed and through Insta­gram Sto­ries, short snip­pets of every­day life from users.

On Tik­Tok, video is the main method of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, com­bined with orig­i­nal audio. Cre­at­ing con­tent is sim­ple and stream­lined, and poten­tial­ly vis­i­ble to an audi­ence of mil­lions. In the UK, Tik­Tok has 17 mil­lion month­ly active users, a quar­ter of the pop­u­la­tion.

“Con­sumer inter­face is the key to TikTok’s not-so-secret recipe for suc­cess: they com­plete­ly remove the para­dox of choice,” says Andrew Rajanathan, glob­al busi­ness direc­tor at Pub­li­cis Imag­ine, which works with brands to mar­ket their com­pa­nies on social media plat­forms. Pub­li­cis also man­ages some of TikTok’s glob­al media adver­tis­ing.

“Every­thing is served in one spot, designed to bring videos to users, instead of mak­ing the users search for them,” says Rajanathan.

A Taku­mi sur­vey of the mar­ket­ing sec­tor shows that in the cur­rent cli­mate, Insta­gram is the place most busi­ness­es put their mon­ey on social media. Eigh­teen per cent of busi­ness­es believed Insta­gram was the best mar­ket­ing chan­nel to receive a good return on invest­ment in influ­encer cam­paigns, com­pared to 6 per cent who said Tik­Tok. But that’s based on Insta­gram pho­to posts, rather than Reels.

“Reels feels like an add on,” says Rajanathan. “It’s impos­si­ble not to notice the flood of reu­ploaded videos from Tik­Tok, with Tik­Tok water­marks still dot­ting the upper left-hand cor­ner of reel after reel.”

An industry primed for growth

But that might not be the case for long. The stakes in the bat­tle pit­ting Reels ver­sus Tik­Tok are poten­tial­ly huge. Accord­ing to Taku­mi, over the last year, three quar­ters of com­pa­nies have allo­cat­ed more resources to influ­encer mar­ket­ing, with big increas­es in spend­ing in retail, legal and man­u­fac­tur­ing, in par­tic­u­lar. It’s a sec­tor ready to grow sig­nif­i­cant­ly.

And Reels is com­ing around the cor­ner. “The Reels prod­uct only launched in August, but there is no com­pli­men­ta­ry ad prod­uct at present,” says Rajanathan. “We can expect, based on the typ­i­cal Face­book and Insta­gram play­book, that an ad prod­uct that also cov­ers both brand aware­ness and direct response will arrive soon­er rather than lat­er.”

Keane-Daw­son also thinks the choice won’t be a bina­ry one for brands. “We expect cre­ators to con­tin­ue using Tik­Tok, while also test­ing out Insta­gram Reels,” she says. “And for brands, the ris­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty of Insta­gram Reels will like­ly accel­er­ate the use of short-form video apps by mar­keters.”

It’s hard to deny the might of Face­book, Instagram’s par­ent com­pa­ny. Yet Tik­Tok has proved to be a social media mon­ster, dom­i­nat­ing all that has gone before it. Its growth in just two years eclipses even that of Face­book itself. Before TikTok’s sec­ond birth­day, it had achieved near­ly half the UK users Face­book took 15 years to acquire.

The future of TikTok and Instagram

As we’ve seen with the rise and fall of numer­ous social plat­forms in the past, such as Myspace and Bebo, or the false dawns that promised so much, but remain sim­ply a stal­wart of the social media scene like Snapchat, can­ny mar­keters don’t put all their eggs in one bas­ket, but instead rely on reach­ing con­sumers wher­ev­er they may be.

At the minute that appears to be Tik­Tok. Its user base is young, pos­sess­ing the all-impor­tant dis­pos­able income brands are keen to cap­ture. It also ben­e­fits from the dynamism and trendi­ness of being the hot new app that brands can lever­age to their favour. For some, Insta­gram is old hat and old news. But more impor­tant­ly than pick­ing one app over the oth­er, it’s how you use them that mat­ters most.

“What will be a fun­da­men­tal chal­lenge for adver­tis­ers and agen­cies to over­come is build­ing cre­ative assets that are bespoke for these new plat­forms,” says Pub­li­cis Imagine’s Rajanathan. “For brands, mes­sages can be deployed in very unique ways, using the var­i­ous fea­tures on Tik­Tok and Reels.” Whichev­er app you choose, don’t sim­ply repur­pose the same mes­sages and videos from TV adverts onto social media, or even cross-pol­li­nate between the two plat­forms. Instead, carve out dis­tinct, unique mes­sages on both, best suit­ed to your audi­ence.