Why Instagram Reels Became So Popular ?

© Unsplash/Claudio Schwarz

In 2020, the world is at a standstill. With the Covid-19 pandemic, millions of people are confined. To combat boredom, many install the app of the moment “TikTok”. But the social network, a direct descendant of Musicaly, owned by ByteDance in China, is failing to attract the general public.

Other social networks, led by Instagram, quickly adopted TikTok's flagship concept. Short, often silent videos in vertical format. A major first for the entertainment world, which has been accustomed to the naturally slower horizontal format since the emergence of television.

While everyone is adopting the “TikTok” recipe, from Facebook to YouTube and even X (formerly Twitter), only Instagram seems able to compete with the Chinese phenomenon, which is gaining millions of subscribers every week.

Instagram: copy then overtake?

© Solen Feyissa/Pexels

Instagram's success with vertical formats could seem like a stroke of luck if there hadn't already been precedents. In 2013, Instagram had already launched its stories just a few months after the emergence of Snapchat, which had a very similar (if not identical) feature.

So when Instagram launches its reels in the heart of summer 2020, TikTok's fate seems sealed. Although the Chinese giant continues to march forward today, the arrival of competitors on the North American continent, led by Instagram, has significantly slowed down the ambitions of ByteDance and its social network.

Instagram: the social network for everyone

Long dedicated to photographers, the Instagram application has known several eras. After photos of cats and breakfasts came the time of stories. Each time, the social network has gained new subscribers, without losing its oldest users.

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The application has thus managed to seduce, again and again, becoming the social network of Mr. and Mrs. Everyone. Today, the whole world uses Instagram. If TikTok is going crazy with numbers that are each bigger than the other, the second most used social network in the world (behind Facebook) is indeed its little sister, Instagram.

In France, in 2023, the application had 26 million active users (at least one connection per month). This is still less than Facebook and YouTube, but it is still much more than TikTok (between 10 and 15 million) and Snapchat.

© Christian Wiediger/Unsplash

Even among 15-24 year-olds, who are TikTok's core target, the Californian social network maintains the lead. The app is used an average of 5.1 times per day compared to 3.4 times for TikTok. Only Snapchat manages to outpace its two competitors, with an average of 6 activations per day.

Another interesting figure for Instagram is that the app is becoming more and more gender-balanced. Even if its audience is still predominantly female, the figures are trending in the same direction. In 2020, 46% of users were men, and there are 2% more in 2023.

Finally, the success of Reels on Instagram can be explained in two ways. The first is the perfect understanding of the phenomenon of short formats. Instagram has managed to seize the trend by capitalizing on an already very large audience.

The second strong point of the application is its audience. Ever more numerous and diverse, it also knows how to be loyal to the application, despite the arrival of new competitors. Instagram existed before Snapchat and overtook its competitor by playing its own game. Mark Zuckerberg's social network is now trying to do the same, but with an opponent of a completely different caliber, TikTok.

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