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, Meta is flooding users’ feeds with ads for Instagram. In the last hour of TikTok, some users saw ads for Instagram.
TikTok’s Ad Library, a transparency tool that allows anyone to search what paid campaigns are running on the platform, shows that Meta ran dozens of sponsored videos about Instagram and Reels in January that were collectively viewed by millions of users. But the tool includes data from only a select number of countries—mostly in Europe—and doesn’t cover what ads TikTok users may have seen in the United States.
On Facebook, a number of people reported seeing a different promotion appear on their news feeds last week, encouraging them to link their TikTok accounts to their Facebook pages. Build your social presence across apps by showing your TikTok profile link and follower count on your Facebook Page. Given the timing, this feels a bit passive aggressive. Facebook is trolling users by suggesting we add our TikTok accounts to our Facebook pages.
The prompt appears to be connected to a feature Meta launched last month that allows users to display their YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram handles and follower counts on Facebook. However, the banner that people reported seeing in recent days mentioned only TikTok by name. The feature makes it easier for creators’ followers on other platforms to find and follow them on Facebook.
