Reels are coming to Facebook. Kinda.
After the long-awaited ability to post stories on Facebook came the even longer, more awaited feature of being able to schedule and post stories to Instagram from Business Manager, but now Reels are coming to Facebook.
And here’s what we know about them:
- You will be able to share your Insta Reels to Facebook Reels
- You won’t have quite the same features as you do on Instagram Reels
- This is going to be good for businesses
Let’s dive a little deeper into the limited information that we have so far.
Sharing will be enabled between Instagram Reels and Facebook Reels
This is a bit of a no-brainer, after all, all the good stuff seems to be on Instagram these days. What we know so far, is that you will be able to automatically and manually share your Instagram-made Reels from the Instagram app over to the Facebook app. This means you’ll get more bang for your buck than what you were getting from only posting them to Instagram.
The whispers we are hearing indicate that the Facebook Reels will appear in your page’s timeline, just like regular videos do now. They will also then appear in your Videos tab after that. We don’t know if there will be a specific Reels tab though.
The ability to share is important because we do know that not all Instagram Reels features will be available on the Facebook version.
It’s going to be a kind of Reels Lite
The Facebook Reels version won’t contain everything that the Instagram version does. And this tracks with the pattern of Facebook reducing the functionality of their ported Instagram features from the Instagram app to the “blue app” such as in the case of Instagram Stories being much more full-featured than its Instagram equivalent.
For example, the Remix feature (similar to the Duet feature on TikTok) won’t be available on the Facebook Reels version. And while it’s a heavily used feature on TikTok, it’s not so popular on Instagram Reels, so I’m not sure that it will be too heavily missed.
I am assuming that the same music library limitations will occur as we see between Personal and Business accounts on Instagram. Popular copyrighted music will likely only be available to individuals, not businesses. However, on Instagram, where there is a Creator account that allows you have a business as well as getting access to the full music library, there is no such equivalent account type on Facebook.
Oh, and this is an important thing to take note of, initially, Facebook Reels will only be able to be used in Groups. Yes, you heard right. Groups. The one place where video posts are used the least. Not personal profiles. Not pages. Groups. My guess is that this is all about staging the release out to a smaller user group first before making it more widely available elsewhere on Facebook.
It’s already rolling out to a very limited number of US-based users, but we’re pretty sure that it will come to everyone once it gets some momentum.
When it does eventually come to Pages, it’ll be good for business
The one thing that we can rely upon when a new feature lands on a social platform, is that the platform will favour content that uses the new format.
We saw it with Facebook Live, Instagram Stories, Instagram Reels and even IGTV.
So we can only assume that when it does land, Facebook will be offering priority on the feed for content that uses Facebook Reels, at least for a little while. It’s like an introductory offer at a supermarket. Incentivise the new thing and they will come. Hopefully they’ll love the new thing and keep using it.
Though, given that the best features of TikTok haven’t made it to Instagram Reels and the best feature of Instagram Reels won’t make it to Facebook Reels, I doubt that the new placement will make much of an impact over the long term.
But initially, the early movers on to the new format will be the winners. And with business content at an all-time low, and it being nearly impossible to get a message in front of people without a big spend attached, we will use any leg-up that we can, to get an edge.
Listen to this on my podcast
https://audioboom.com/posts/7941788
Dante St James is the founder of Clickstarter, a Facebook Blueprint Certified Lead Trainer, a Community Trainer with Facebook Australia, a digital advisor with Treeti Business Consulting, an accredited ASBAS Digital Solutions advisor and presenter, and the editor at The Small Marketer. You can watch free 1-hour webinars and grow your digital skills at Dante’s YouTube Channel.
