It seems that Meta is making a big effort to promote Reels. Social media consultant Matt Navarra posted a screenshot on Twitter showing a notification for an experimental Instagram feature that says all video posts will be shared as Reels in the app.
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If your account is public, this means that anyone can discover your video and use your original audio to create their own Reel. Only friends will see your video if your profile is private, but other users can create a remix with your Reel and download it as part of their remix. The only way to ensure that no one uses your Reel for a remix is to turn off the option in Settings or disable it for every video you post.
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As TechCrunch notes, this move is not surprising when TikTok-style videos have quickly become popular form both on Instagram and on Facebook. When he revealed the company's fourth quarterly earnings report for 2021, the Mark Zuckerberg said that Reels is now the fastest growing content format of Meta. Meta's Chief Product Officer, Chris Cox, called Reels a "bright spot" for the company, too, in a recent note shared with Employees, warning them for "serious times" coming because of deceleration of development. He also said that one of the projects in which Meta intends to to focus for the second half of 2022 is to generate revenue from Reels as quickly as possible.
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Apparently, the time spent viewing short-form videos has more than doubled since last year, with 80% of that increase coming from Facebook. This is why the company will go so far as to redesign the home pages of Instagram and the Facebook to incorporate better the short videos. Converting all video posts to Reels would give the company more content to release, which in turn would be translated to more video viewing time in the platform and higher potential profits from ads. Of course, it should be noted that not all of Instagram's experimental features make it to wide release and it remains to be seen if it will survive the testing phase.
Source of information: engadget.com
