Are you using videos to market your products/services?

More than a whopping 80% of mobile internet traffic is consumed by videos, which shows the significance of video content. That’s why 86% of companies use video content as a marketing technique.

The competition in video marketing has become so fierce that various video-sharing platforms emerge left and right. In this situation, choosing the right platform for video marketing is so important. Actually, you can’t just take videos and send them everywhere.

Instagram and TikTok are two famous platforms that are suitable for video marketing. More specifically, Instagram Reels is really similar to TikTok in terms of short videos, and as a result, it’s good to know their differences.

In this article, we’re going to compare them to help you choose the best one for your marketing strategy. Read on to find out which platform is better for your marketing: Instagram Reels vs TikTok!

What is TikTok?

TikTok is a short video-sharing platform owned by Chinese company ByteDance, allowing users to create and post entertaining videos.

It’s one of the newest video-sharing apps and is the fastest-growing one in the world, especially in the US. Although there were lots of video-sharing platforms, it could soon gain fame among young people and then businesses. TikTok is now one of the best platforms for video marketing and can greatly help brands build an online identity.

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What is Instagram Reels?

Here is how Instagram introduces Reels:

Bring your ideas to life with easy-to-use text, AR filters, and audio tools with Reels​. Discover, share, and create multi-clip videos up to 30 seconds.

Reels is one of the most recent video-sharing social media features, released by Instagram. It’s focused on short videos as Instagram already had several perfect features for video content such as IGTV, Stories, Live, and Feed.

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It‘s well established that the main purpose for creating Reels is to compete with the popularity of TikTok. This has started fierce competition in the realm of entertaining videos on social media.

Let’s see who can win this competition.

TikTok vs Instagram: statistics

First, let’s look at some important stats of these two platforms to familiarize ourselves with their performance in the world.

Here is a summary of the most important statistics for these two platforms, considering the fact that Reels is part of Instagram and inherits its major stats.

TikTok stats

• TikTok has more than 650 million monthly active users across the globe.  
• The TikTok app has been installed by more than 2 billion smartphones.
• More than 60% of TikTok users are aged between 16 and 24.
• Users usually spend an average of 52 minutes each day on TikTok.
• The people of 155 countries have access to TikTok in 75 languages.

Instagram stats

• There are more than 1 billion monthly active Instagram users in the world.
• 71% of Instagram users are under 35 years old.
• Instagram users spend an average of 53 minutes per day on the app.
• Instagram supports 36 languages across the globe.
• 71% of US businesses have Instagram business accounts.

IG Reels vs TikTok: main differences

Now that you know the number of users of these two popular platforms, it’s good to look at their main technical differences.

The length and size of videos

The first difference between TikTok and IG Reels is that you can respectively record videos up to 60 and 30 seconds on them. So, at the moment, Tiktok gives you twice the time Instagram gives its users on Reels.

In the beginning, TikTok videos could only be 15s long, but they extended the limit to 60 seconds. Fortunately, there is good news that the company is increasing the time limit to 3 minutes.

You might think a 30-second doesn’t make a big difference but in reality, the behavior of many users has proved that this difference is a lot.

Of course, this should be considered that Instagram has provided many other options like IGTV for creating Instagram videos with various lengths. So this 30-second limitation is intentional and might make users become more creative.

Try to see if you can create a video for both platforms and remain creative on IG Reels even with this limitation.

Editing features

Video editing tools are an essential part of every video-sharing tool because many users don’t like to send their videos without filters.

You might think that there is not a big difference between these editing tools and filters on various platforms. But looking closer, you’ll figure out that filters on TikTok are way better compared with Reels.

TikTok offers a great number of filters, effects, and templates, and as a result, users usually don’t need any third-party app in this regard.

On Instagram, on the other hand, the filters and effects are limited to those in the effect library of Instagram.

Also, TikTok is better in terms of voice effects providing you with lots of fun voice editing tools. But Instagram doesn’t let you add any sound effects to your videos.

Insights

Analyzing your performance and measuring your marketing ROI is one of the most critical tasks of social media marketing. As a result, having great analytics tools is a key factor in choosing a platform.

On TikTok, if you acquire a Pro Account, you’ll find access to all analytics features of the platform. It has a great built-in feature for both audience and content analysis. So you can easily target the right audiences and also figure out what type of content is better for them.

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Also, it has Sounds where you can figure out what your followers have listened to. This way, you can decide what music you have to use.

More importantly, it provides you with insightful data about when and where your videos have been trendy so you can optimize your content accordingly.

Unfortunately, Instagram Reels doesn’t provide you with lots of analytics features. At the moment, you can only see the number of views, likes, and comments which is only enough to calculate the engagement rates.

Ads

Initially, Instagram didn’t provide business accounts with paid advertisement features on Reels, but it seems that this is going to change.

Previously, you had to work on content creation and promote your products/services using it. Influencer marketing was also very useful in that situation. 

But on TikTok, there are some sponsored options, making it way better than Reels in terms of marketing. In fact, you are allowed to monetize your content, while Instagram Reels doesn’t let you do that.

That is to say, creating and promoting branded content is much more suitable on TikTok than Reels. 

What should you choose for your brand?

When all is said and done, it’s time to choose a platform for your business to increase your brand awareness and finally, your sales.

It’s obvious that for small businesses and recently launched brands, TikTok is a better option when comparing with Reels. Of course, when you consider all other features of Instagram, it still outweighs TikTok.

The thing is that you have to use social media to its full capacity. So it’s recommended to be active and use both platforms to your advantage. This way, you can reach out to as many niche audiences as possible.

A good social media strategist should be ready for future trends. Using both these platforms gives you the flexibility of matching with upcoming changes in the popularity of TikTok or Reels.

Conclusion

Generally speaking, TikTok and Reels are both interesting and attractive video-sharing tools. But at the moment, TikTok is better in terms of marketing and advertising. IG Reels is not currently sought-after for businesses, although it’s growing fast and it might outweigh its rival in the near future, just like when it outperformed Snapchat with Instagram Stories.

About the author: Tom Siani is the content manager of Blog Waves. He is also collaborating with some well-known brands in order to generate traffic, create sales funnels, and increase online sales. He has written a considerable number of articles about social media marketing, brand marketing, blogging, search visibility, etc.