What if Instagram extended the length of Reels to 10 minutes ? 📹

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After the trend towards shorter formats, are social networks ready to turn back the clock?🤔Instagram will in any case be banking on a revised length for its formats, particularly Reels, those vertical videos largely inspired by its Chinese rival TikTok.

The platform war rages on ⚔️

If this change is officially implemented, it will give creators more time and flexibility to produce more comprehensive content. In other words, content producers will be able to produce cooking demonstrations, beauty tutorials, educational content, humorous sketches and many other types of content that have made their fortune and fame, while presenting more detail.

Until now, influencers and creators have had to adopt stratagems, even if it meant omitting essential parts of their content, to get around the three-minute limit. They also had to redirect viewers to other platforms to watch the second part of the video. But let’s be honest, this could result in a significant loss of viewers depending on the type of content. 😓

However, while Instagram and TikTok are trying to grab a slice of the long-form content market, YouTube is looking to embrace short videos more by launching a new TikTok-like stream of personalized short videos, called « Samples ». What a turnaround!

Instagram focuses on retention strategy🤗

Until now, Reels were limited to a duration of 3 minutes. However, as reported by TechCrunch, Instagram plans to raise this limit to a maximum of 10 minutes.

#Instagram is working on the ability to create #Reels up to 10 minutes long 👀 pic.twitter.com/jQTUM9fPsM

— Alessandro Paluzzi (@alex193a) August 30, 2023

This new feature, currently in the test phase, could be deployed on the social network in the coming months.

Even if it’s a big update, Instagram is succeeding in attracting new users and retaining existing ones, thanks to these formats. This strategy has paid off for Meta (the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp and Threads), as last April Instagram reported that the launch of Reels had led to a 24% increase in time spent on the app.

Sources: TechCrunch, Blog du Modérateur, BFM TV