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Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has recently announced a bunch of new "creative expression" features that will enhance the user experience of the social media platform. These features include the ability to create longer Reels of up to 90 seconds, as opposed to the previous limit of 60 seconds. The announcement was made on Friday via the company's "Meta for Creators" account on Facebook.
In addition to the extended length for Reels, creators can now easily make "Ready-made" Reels from their 'Memories', just like they do on Instagram. Moreover, Meta has introduced a new feature called "Grooves," which automatically aligns and syncs the motion in the users' video to the beat of the song.
Furthermore, Meta is rolling out a "Templates" feature, similar to TikTok's templating option, that allows users to create Reels with popular templates. This feature has been available on Instagram Reels for over a year and enables users to create new Reels using the same structure as the one they just watched.
These new Reels features were initially introduced on Instagram more than seven months ago and are now being released on Facebook. Meta likely wanted to assess their performance on Instagram Reels before rolling them out to Facebook Reels. Facebook launched Reels last year to counter TikTok's dominance over the short video market.
Initially, Meta viewed Reels as a feature inside the Instagram app to directly compete with TikTok. However, the company soon realised that it could mount a more robust counteroffensive by bringing Facebook into the mix and allowing cross-posting between the two social networks.
Last month, Meta also announced updates to Facebook's "Why am I seeing this ad?" tool to provide more transparency about how it uses machine learning models to deliver advertisements to users. The tool will explain "how your activity both on and off our technologies may inform the machine learning models we use to shape and deliver the ads you see." This move is part of Meta's ongoing efforts to increase transparency and regain user trust.