Over the past couple of years, TikTok, the brainchild of Chinese tech company ByteDance, has blown up particularly among teens. Not one to miss the party Facebook is now planning to incorporate some of the apps choice features into Instagram in the near future, according to recent reports.
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Guest post by Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0
TikTok has taken the world by storm over the last couple of years, especially with the teen crowd. Launched in 2017 by the Chinese tech company ByteDance for markets outside of China, the mobile app allows its 500 million active users to create and share short lip-sync, comedy, and talent videos. TikTok’s success hasn’t been overlooked by Facebook however, and word is that it intends to incorporate the app’s best features into Instagram soon.
Reportedly Instagram is working on a new feature called “Clips” that allows users to record segments of videos into a single video Story. Lke TikTok, users can overlay music on those Clips and adjust the speed and timer of each one.
Incorporating features from other popular apps has long been a strategy for Facebook and its subsidiaries. For instance, it’s made video a standard feature after seeing the success of YouTube, and later replicated Snapchat’s Stories and AR masks.
The whole idea for any new feature is to keep users on Facebook or Instagram for as long as possible. Any reason for someone to leave those platforms for another app is what it’s trying to eliminate.
Facebook has 2.7 billion active users, but it’s losing its foothold with younger users to apps like TikTok. There are many reasons why teens don’t want to use Facebook beyond a feature or two, so it’s unlikely emulating TikTok would bring them back. That said, Instagram is much preferred to Facebook by most Millennials, so incorporating a new TikTok-like feature there might work.
Clips hasn’t been deployed yet, but watch for it to come to at least a beta test soon.