Instagram isn’t just competing with TikTok’s algorithm and content. It’s also trying to claim a stake in the creative process.
In April, Instagram unveiled its stand-alone video editing app Edits — directly competing with CapCut, owned by TikTok parent ByteDance.
“Our vision for it is really to be an end-to-end creative studio,” Brett Westervelt, Instagram’s VP of design, told Business Insider.
Six months in, Instagram is sharing some data around Edits’ momentum.
About half of the people “watching reels on Instagram” are seeing content that was made using the Edits app, Westervelt said. And in the third quarter, the weekly number of people using Edits to make videos “almost doubled,” according to the company. Meta declined to share specific numbers, however, such as the number of monthly users Edits has.
Westervelt attributes Edits’ early growth to word of mouth, but also to one of the app’s biggest value props: It’s free.
“A lot of the other apps are starting to paywall individual features like captions, which, for us, we’re making entirely free,” he said. While that could change down the line — something Instagram’s top exec, Adam Mosseri, has hinted at as a possibility — having a free editing product is beneficial for Edits’ acquisition of creators.
Instagram features need to meet the needs of its 3 billion users, as well as more niche audiences, such as professional content creators.
“If we do Edits really well, we’ll have this kind of thing that is approachable to anyone, but that ultimately meets the needs of creators,” Westervelt said. “We want a tool that feels essential.”
Instagram is doubling down on its goal to deliver robust editing tools. It has rolled out more than 50 new product updates, from bulk editing captions to a teleprompter feature for filming content directly within the app. Many of the product updates have come from feedback Instagram gathers from creators themselves, Westervelt said.
Meta
Westervelt said Instagram’s team overseeing Edits is meeting with creators “almost every week.”
One of the creators Instagram is working closely with is Vita Kari, an artist based in Los Angeles. Kari is part of Instagram’s “Edits Council,” a small group of creators that Instagram pays to provide feedback. Westervelt described the council as “like a board of directors,” helping steer the Edits road map.
For instance, Kari, who is hard of hearing, said they worked closely with the Instagram team on developing its caption editing tools.
Instagram is testing a new feature: Storyboards
Instagram wants to get involved in every step of the creative process — even the brainstorming phase.
“Everyone has different ways of keeping track of ideas,” Westervelt said. “Some people send emails to themselves, some people have physical notebooks where they’re jotting things down.”
When interviewing creators about their processes, Google Docs and Apple’s Notes App also came up a lot, he said.
Starting this week, Instagram is testing a new Edits feature called “Storyboards,” which will help creators visually outline their videos. The app already had a “stickies” feature, allowing users to create notes for themselves when brainstorming.
“There’s this moment where you have to take that list of ideas and actually turn them into something,” Westervelt said. “What we’re trying to do with Storyboards is take the little sticky notes that are in the app today and let you start to break it into scenes or a script.”
So, does using Edits boost your content?
Like any new feature Instagram rolls out, creators want to know: Will using this feature increase the number of people who see my content?
The short answer: For now, yes.
Mosseri said in an Instagram post this summer that using Edits slightly helps. This is still the case, and Instagram has been featuring videos made with Edits more prominently in the app’s feed. It’s intended to be temporary, however.
Another reason using Edits might boost your content in the Instagram app has more to do with the technical quality of the video, Westervelt said.
“People tend to notice if the visual quality is high,” he said.
Instagram’s algorithmic ranking system favors video content that is smooth, not blurry, and has higher frame rates. Westervelt said that the Edits app exports videos at a higher quality than the native Instagram app editing tools.
“We’ll work on improving the Instagram experience over time, but we’re just really focused on quality with Edits,” he added.
