On June 29, 2020 the Government of India banned several Chinese applications from the play store. One of these applications was Tiktok. Tiktok has about 200 million and 119 active users in our country. The country saw a regressive reaction because of this digitally. This was a means of earning and popularity for the youth. Right after Tiktok was banned in the country, Instagram launched a new feature named reels that a lot of users claim to be similar to Tiktok.
INSTAGRAM REELS:
Reels allows its users to record short 15 seconds videos using original sounds or pre existing sound clips from other posts. One can record their videos, add audio, AR effects, and edit them on Instagram.
TIKTOK:
Tiktok is a Chinese application where one can make a video of 3 to 60 seconds adding audio and different effects. One can use their original audios to it, or may use the songs available in the library. Earlier known as musically, Tiktok is a three year old application giving employment to a majority of youth in the country.
DATA
INSTAGRAM REELS TIKTOK
NUMBER OF USERS 100m active users 119m active users
MAIN FOCUS Dancing, Cooking & meme Lip syncing & dance
VIDEO LENGTH 3-15 seconds 3-60 seconds
DIFFERENCES AND CONCLUSION:
There has been a lot of talk about Instagram Reels being very similar to Tiktok, and Instagram has released Reels just to capture over the Tiktok users.
There are some differences between Tiktok and Instagram Reels:
- Tiktok allows its users to post a video of maximum length of 60 seconds, while Reels allows the maximum of 15 seconds.
- One can comment on the Instagram reels, whereas there is no comment option in Tiktok.
- Reels is a part of the social networking site called Instagram, but Tiktok is an application on itself.
- For the Gen Z and millennials, Tiktok, despite being only 3 years old is a part of their lives, a social statement for popularity. Instagram reels were no different from Tiktok, and a lot of users shifted to reels.
- While comparing the two of them, one can clearly not point out major differences between the two of these.
- While Instagram is a social networking site where people can connect to others, look into other lives and gain followers, Tiktok is simply for video sharing.
People that claim that the two are the same, are true. One cannot say if it’s copied or original as many picture and video sharing apps can choose this. Reels did take inspiration from tiktok. While facebook owned Instagram could have made the reels interface different from tiktok, there is no harm in a similar concept, given the Chinese application Tiktok has been banned in several countries.
