It was an opportunity too good for Meta to ignore: On January 19, TikTok, one of its biggest social media rivals, was set to go dark across the United

How Meta Tried to Lure TikTok Users to Instagram

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2025-01-22 09:30:05

It was an opportunity too good for Meta to ignore: On January 19, TikTok, one of its biggest social media rivals, was set to go dark across the United States when a new national security law went into effect. In the days and weeks before the ban, as millions of Americans were scrambling to find a suitable alternative to TikTok, Meta found ways to promote Instagram and Facebook as the answer. The tech giant made a flurry of design tweaks, rolled out new features, and ran advertisements that all positioned its platforms—and especially its video product, Reels—as direct competitors to TikTok.

Instagram has scaled back its in-app shopping initiatives in recent years, but on Friday, Meta showed off a new feature that appears to be directly ripped from TikTok Shop, TikTok’s widely successful ecommerce platform. In a promotional video, two shopping creators working for Meta explained how influencers can now “more prominently display” products they are marketing in Reels. Instead of putting an Amazon or Walmart link in the comments, they can add a banner directing viewers to click on the item at the bottom of their videos—just like how it works on TikTok Shop.

Some of Meta’s other efforts were just as pointed. Right before TikTok stopped working for roughly 14 hours on Saturday, some people reported that among the last things they saw on the platform were sponsored posts for Instagram. “Unsurprisingly, as TikTok goes down tonight, Meta is flooding my FYP with ads for Instagram,” one person said in a Bluesky post, referring to TikTok’s AI-powered For You Page feed. “In my last hour of TikTok I saw ads for instagram,” another person said on Threads.