Meta Platforms has announced a series of new ad formats designed to help advertisers reach their audience based on how they spend their time on the company’s platforms.
Among the changes are new Facebook Reels ads and video ecosystem updates, the company said in a blog post on Tuesday (Oct. 4).
“People aren’t simply consuming Reels — they are actively engaging and having conversations around them,” the post said. “As we shared in Q2 earnings, we saw a more than 30% increase in the time people spent engaging with Reels across Facebook and Instagram.”
And to make it easier for businesses to create ads on Reels, Meta says it will offer “free, high-quality songs from our Meta Sound Collection” that can be added to Carousel Ads on Reels. Businesses can pick a song from the Meta library or let the app automatically select the best music for an ad based on its content.
In addition, the company says it will test post-loop ads, which are 4- to 10- second skippable and standalone video ads that play when a Reel has ended. Once the ad is done, the original Reel resumes and loops again.
On Instagram, businesses can now put ads in “Explore home, the grid that people see when they first arrive on the Explore tab,” Meta said.
The company will also test ads in profile feed, as well as “a monetization opportunity that will allow eligible creators to earn extra income from ads displayed in their profile feeds, beginning with select U.S. creators.”
See also: Report: Users Still Spending 10x Time on TikTok Than Instagram Reels
Meta launched Reels on Facebook in 2021 — it was already a feature on Instagram — and has pushed video hard in response to competition from popular social media platform TikTok.
Last month, reports emerged that these efforts had fallen short, with the amount of time Instagram users spend watching Reels is less than 10% of the time TikTok users spend watching videos on their platform.
In addition, Reels engagement had dropped 13.6% during the summer, with just 20% of creators on Instagram posting on the platform at least once a month.
“We still have some work to do,” Meta spokeswoman Devi Narasimhan said at the time. “But creators and businesses are seeing promising results, and our monetization growth is faster than we expected as more people are watching, creating and connecting through Reels than ever before.”
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