Facebook took Snapchat’s prime feature, and marketed it in the most successful way possible. Taking inspiration from the most trending feature on social media, YouTube is going to launch its own version of Stories. YouTube will be calling it ‘Reels’, and the feature will be exclusive to YouTube Community launched last September for creators.
YouTube, in a blog post, announces its latest updates on Community and towards the end mentions about Reels. Through Reels, YouTube wants creators to increase engagements with their fans. YouTube says that Reels is the company’s “spin on the popular stories format, but designed specifically for YouTube creators”. Creators will be able to make short videos with duration extending up to 30 seconds. YouTube is also integrating features already available on Community for Reels. This means that creators will be able to add media on their videos like text, images, animated GIFs, music, and also “YouTube-y stickers”.
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Creators will also be allowed to link YouTube videos to Reels. However, unlike Stories, videos posted on Reels will not come with an expiry date. On Snapchat, Instagram and other social platforms, Stories posted have an expiry time of 24 hours. After the said duration, Stories disappear from their accounts.
YouTube has shared a video of how Reels looks like. From the video, we can see that you can create Reels of different categories, and add videos accordingly. Reels is currently in beta mode and the final product is expected to launch soon, but after proper experimentation. In addition to announcing Reels, YouTube has also expanded Community to creators with over 10,000 subscribers.
YouTube has also made some changes to the Community tab. Now the most engaged viewers will see Community posts in their Home feed regardless of being subscribed to the channel or not. YouTube also says that it has optimized notifications for Community. However, this doesn’t assure that notifications for every Community post will be received.
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