Instagram has released a new end-of-year feature that lets users create a 2022 Recap Reel from up to 14 photos.
On Monday, Instagram announced it was rolling out a new Reels template that allows users a customizable way to share up to 14 photos and videos from the year with their followers.
To use the 2002 Recap template, users need to navigate to the Reels tab within the Instagram app by tapping the play icon at the bottom center of their screen.
Users then must tap the camera icon at the top right of the Instagram app and swipe the text at the bottom of the screen to the left to access Templates.
They can then choose the “2002 Recap template” and follow the on-screen instructions to select up to 14 photos and produce an end-of-year Reel to share with followers.
Instagram users can further customize their 2022 Recap Reel by choosing a narrated audio from selected artists including Bad Bunny, DJ Khaled, rapper Badshah or Stranger Things’ Priah Ferguson.
It’s All About Reels
The release of Instagram’s 2022 Recap template comes after shareable end-of-year content, such as Spotify’s Wrapped, becomes increasingly popular.
In 2021, Instagram rolled out a “Year in Review” feature that allowed users to select up to 10 stories to share with their followers.
Prior to that, Instagram users had to create their own version of an end-of-year feature where they would post their top nine images in a photo grid.
The 2022 Recap template is also further evidence of the platform’s continued focus on Reels after Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced it was “no longer a photo-sharing app” last year.
Meta, the parent company of Instagram, Meta had $80 billion wiped off its market value in October.
However, amid these struggles, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that Instagram’s Reels is now the fastest-growing format across Meta’s family of apps and services, hitting a $3 billion annual revenue run rate (ARR) in the third quarter of 2022.
He also disclosed that the production and consumption of Reels were 50 percent more than six months ago.
However, Meta’s CEO says that monetization remains a challenge for the format and Instagram’s Reels currently do not generate as much advertising income as Stories or feeds.
He revealed that Reels is costing Meta more than $500 million in lost revenue per quarter. But the company expects to break even with Reels “over the next 12 to 18 months.”
“Reels are incremental to time spent on our apps. The trends look good here,” Zuckerberg says. “We believe we are gaining time spent share on our competitors like TikTok.”
Zuckerberg’s statements are seemingly at odds with a report published internally at Meta in August that revealed that Reels have less than one-tenth of the engagement of TikTok videos.
According to the internal papers that were seen by The Wall Street Journal, Reels engagement not only fails to keep up even close to what is seen on TikTok but that number is falling. Even more damning, the report disclosed that “most Reels users have no engagement whatsoever.”
