Skip to main content

Reels are about to show up in yet another Facebook feature

As its answer to TikTok, Reels is clearly a particularly important priority for Meta. Which is why a number of its platforms’ recent feature updates often involve Reels. And today’s announcement was not exempt from Meta’s push to make Reels just as competitive as TikTok.

On Thursday, Meta announced that it would be bringing Reels to Facebook Groups, mentioning it as one of three new ways for users to “to connect over shared interests.” Facebook group members and admins will be able to add “audio, text overlay and filters on top of their videos before sharing to bring their stories to life.”

Related Videos
Reels in Groups Facebook Communities Summit announcement.
screenshot

Beside their blog post announcement, the enabling of Reels in Groups was also announced via Facebook’s 6th Facebook Communities Summit, a screenshot of which is below.

Meta is also continuing to further connect its two flagship social media platforms, Instagram and Facebook, to each other. In the same announcement, it was also revealed that you’ll be able to share public Facebook events to an Instagram story.

The screenshot of this feature that was shared with Digital Trends seems to show an in-progress Instagram story that features basic information for an upcoming Facebook event and what looks like a button link that says “See Event Page.”

Sharing Facebook Events to Instagram Stories.
Meta

While Reels struggles to keep up with TikTok, it is kind of nice to see Meta focusing more on developing the aspects of its platforms that aren’t TikTok clones, such as Facebook Groups and Events. Even if it means part of that development will involve bringing Reels along for the ride as well.

It seems like a more worthwhile pursuit for Meta would be to develop the unique parts of its platforms that its users still value instead of merely chasing TikTok or the next new thing that comes along.

Editors' Recommendations

Mastodon surpasses 1 million monthly active users as Twitter backlash worsens
Series of four mobile screenshots showing Mastodon's sign-up process.

Mastodon, an alternative to Twitter that's been getting a lot of attention lately, just surpassed 1 million monthly active users this week, all while Twitter struggles to deal with the  backlash caused by recently announced changes to its platform.

On Monday, Eugen Rochko, founder and CEO of Mastodon, announced via a Mastodon post that the social media platform now has "1,028,362 monthly active users across the network today." This news comes after a particularly tumultuous week (and weekend) for Twitter after Elon Musk took over the popular microblogging platform just last month.

Read more
Twitter is reportedly working on paid DMs to celebrities
The Twitter app on the Sony XPeria 5 II.

In what appears to be another effort to help Twitter generate revenue at the start of its Elon Musk era, the social media platform is reportedly working on paid Direct Messaging (DM), with a particular emphasis on those paid messages being sent to celebrities.

On Thursday, The New York Times published a report in which it mentioned that -- according to internal documents it saw and "two people with knowledge of the work" -- that Twitter was working on a paid DM feature that would allow users to send messages to celebrities for a fee. The fee structure for this feature apparently hasn't been officially finalized yet, but The Times did note that it could be "as little as a few dollars per direct message."

Read more
Instagram to soon let creators make NFTs and sell them to fans
Series of four mobile screenshots showing the selling of collectibles on Instagram.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on your favorite social media platforms are apparently here to stay. At least that seems to be the case for one Meta-owned platform.

On Wednesday, as part of its Creator Week event, Meta announced that Instagram will soon let creators make and sell their own NFTs on the app itself. The new ability was described as another way for fans to support their favorite creators.

Read more