Big news from Instagram yesterday, the social media giant launched their new “Reels” feature on their platform.
With the rise of Snapchat and even more recently, TikTok, Instagram has once again played catch up with the competition and launched a very similar function to their app. Who remembers when Insta launched “Stories” as a way to grab the attention of Snapchat users and IGTV to pry people away from sharing long-form videos on YouTube?
If you are up-to-date with TikTok, Reels will seem like a downgraded rip-off. The new functionality allows users to create new videos to share via your stories or via your channel but with the addition of new creative tools to make your videos even better. You can stitch multiple videos together, overlay various text elements at different points and also access music and filters from Insta’s library.
You won’t need to record every video separately and upload them one at a time to Instagram. You can record everything one step at a time natively in the app, adding effects, text and layers to each clip one at a time until you’ve completed your masterpiece.
Once you’re happy with your video, you have multiple sharing options available to you. You can save the video as a draft, encase you need to share at a specific time. You can change the cover image and add captions and hashtags to garner more engagement once posted. Or, you can just click share and get the content out there.
Reels are stored in a separate tab on your profile, so they are easily accessible and stored away from your stories. Once your Reel is out there, it will show up in the explore tab for people who are engaged with your content to see.
We actually can’t wait to have a play around with Reels at HushHQ over the coming weeks and hopefully will share some new content over on our Instagram page.
