Facebook’s parent company Meta has announced a new ‘Sharing to Reels’ feature that would allow creators to post videos directly to Reels from third-party apps. Announced as Instagram Reels in late 2020, the short-format video service came to Facebook last year and has since gained remarkable popularity among users globally. At its Q4 2021 earnings call in February, Meta even claimed that Reels was its “fastest-growing content format by far.”
Facebook is one of the largest social media platforms in the world, with around 2.9 billion monthly active users (MAUs) globally as of Jan. 2022. Instagram is also a massively popular social media app, with roughly one billion monthly active users as of March 2022. The short-format video service Reels is available on both platforms.
Meta has announced the launch of a ‘Sharing to Reels’ feature that will allow third-party app developers to offer their users an option to post videos to Reels directly from their apps. Once developers implement the feature, their apps will get a Reels button, enabling users to share short videos directly to Reels. What’s more, folks making use of the feature will also have access to Reels editing tools like audio, text, effects, captions and stickers. This will save users from the hassle of downloading their videos from third-party apps before uploading them to Reels separately.
Multiple Apps Are Already On Board
Launch partners for the ‘Sharing to Reels’ feature include popular karaoke app Smule and video editing apps Vita and VivaVideo. According to Meta, these three apps have already integrated the new tool, while many other apps are likely to do so in the future. The company also added that the new feature would help Reels reach new audiences while making it easier for creators to post their content on the platform. The ‘Sharing to Reels’ feature comes a few years after Meta (then Facebook) rolled out a ‘Sharing to Stories’ feature that enables users to share content to Facebook Stories directly from third-party apps.
Aimed squarely at tackling TikTok and its ultra-popular short-format, portrait mode videos, Reels was available on Facebook in a few select markets like the U.S. and India before expanding to 150 countries last month. Reels is often described as a blatant copy of TikTok, but it has helped Facebook retain some of its younger user-base that was fast gravitating towards the ultra-popular viral video app. According to Meta, Reels is the most significant contributor to growth on Instagram and was also growing very quickly on Facebook.
