“Reels is already our fastest growing content format by far, and today we’re making it available to everyone on Facebook globally. We want Reels to be the best place for creators to connect with their community and make a living, so we’re launching new monetization tools too. We’re adding creative tools to Facebook Reels like Remix, and the ability to create a Reel from an existing story. We’re also building video clipping tools so that creators who publish live or long-form, recorded videos can test,” said Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Meta (yes, Facebook)
Meta has copied TikTok; it is part of the market system. By having other things within the Meta universe, Reels does not need to be as great as TikTok to thrive. Yes, I have moved to Microsoft OneDrive, cutting off Dropbox, because I want a unified system instead of disparate systems in my laptop. Even if OneDrive is not as great as Dropbox, it is just good enough when combined with other Microsoft products within Microsoft 365. That bundling remains a super appeal in digital businesses.
That is the same playbook here: Reels will thrive because some people will adopt it, and make up with other features within the Meta world.
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Meta has a great strategy of not going into the trap of hiring experts. It has a better statistical chance of thriving with the aggregation model it is deploying here. Quibi which has since folded used movie legends to create short videos without knowing that you have more odds of getting a viral video within millions of videos, than within tens of videos, created by experts. The business model of Quibi was poor, as I wrote, and no wonder the company collapsed despite having prominent business leaders in the game.
Yes, with cloud computing and AI, the probability of getting a hit video compounds in mass-aggregation over a dataset made by few experts. All you need is to look at data and see which video is promising and once identified, soup it up so that everyone will see it. That is virality. Reels will grow even if it is not as great as TikTok.
It is about the power of the business model; Meta is deploying it here.
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