How Meta Tried to Lure TikTok Users to Instagram

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.

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. Meta did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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,” one version of the message read.

Given the timing, “this feels a bit passive aggressive,” one user wrote on X along with a screenshot of the banner. “Facebook is trolling users by suggesting we add our TikTok accounts to our Facebook pages,” joked another person.

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.

TikTok announced it was coming back online in the US on January 19, after president-elect Donald Trump signaled he would sign an executive order following his inauguration the next day extending the deadline for the new law to take full effect. But Capcut, the beloved video-editing app run by TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, remained inaccessible for many people until Monday. Meta rushed to fill the gap, announcing it was launching a new editing app called Edits that appears to be a clone of CapCut. It will be available on Android next month.

Meta also announced a slew of new Instagram Reels features last week that bring the app closer in line with TikTok, not all of which were welcomed by existing users. One is a new tab that lets people see what Reels their mutuals are liking and commenting on, as well as a “reply bar” to engage with that activity. Instagram users can also now upload Reels up to three minutes long, up from 90 seconds (TikTok allows clips up to 60 minutes).

Perhaps the starkest change Instagram made, however, was to suddenly switch the shape of photos and videos on every user’s profile from square to rectangular, mimicking how such content appears on TikTok. The move was met with swift backlash, and many Instagram creators complained that the aesthetic grids they had carefully cultivated over years on Instagram were now ruined.

Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, acknowledged the negative feedback on Monday and said that the company would make it easier for users to customize their own feeds moving forward. “One of the mistakes I made was not giving people enough of a heads up,” he said in a post on Threads.

It’s not clear whether Meta’s strategy will be enough to convince loyal TikTok users to join its platforms or spend more time on them. During the hours that TikTok was inaccessible, Instagram and Facebook appeared to receive only a modest increase in daily active users and downloads, according to the market research firm Sensor Tower.

At least so far, many of Meta’s overtures have been met with suspicion. When TikTok came back online, conspiracy theories began spreading on the platform that Meta was going to take a stake in the company. Horrified creators specifically pointed to what they believed was a “new” official Facebook profile on TikTok as evidence. In reality, however, screenshots from the Internet Archive show that the account has existed since at least 2022.