"You Know What's Cool?"

Facebook has spent a decade successfully ripping off its newer, hotter rivals. But this time, it tried to copy TikTok and blew up Instagram instead

- By Sarah Frier and Brad Stone

Last year an Instagram representative contacted Justina Sharp, a 24-year-old with 93,000 followers, and asked for a meeting to discuss ways she could expand her audience. Sharp thought it was strange to hear from an actual human there, but knew better than to say no. The conversation felt, she says, like the “Facebook gods” coming down from on high to Instagramsplain. The employee “talked at me for exactly half an hour, because that’s how corporate and precise they are,” she recalls. “They gave me all these generic tips that anyone who’s been on social media for five seconds would know how to do.” How to use hashtags, what time of day to post, that sort of thing.

Then, at the very end of the conversation, Sharp got the real pitch. The employee said she’d be most successful if everything she posted was original to Instagram. Suddenly the purpose of the outreach became clear. “Oh, you don’t want me to post TikToks,” she realized. They wanted her to post Reels.

Reels are a kind of short-form video that influencers like Sharp see as a lesser copycat of TikTok’s namesake posts. Instagram owner Facebook (which rebranded in the fall as Meta Platforms Inc.) needs talented users to start posting entertaining Reels to draw young people to the app, and to Facebook by extension. The main social network’s user numbers have flatlined, sending investors running and contributing to a 47% drop in the company’s share price since the start of the year. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg’s strategy to reverse the trend—and shore up investor support for his long-term bets on virtual reality—is centered almost entirely on copying TikTok.