An in-depth look at Meta's ongoing battle to keep Facebook and Instagram relevant as TikTok's growth explodes, including encouraging creators to use Reels
Last year an Instagram representative contacted Justina Sharp, a 24-year-old with 93,000 followers, and asked for a meeting to discuss ways she could expand her audience. Tweets: @bradstone and @mattnavarra Tweets: Brad Stone / @bradstone : Facebook is renovating Instagram - with TikTok in mind. Story for the @BW tech issue with @sarahfrier. https://twitter.com/... Matt Navarra / @mattnavarra : “Mark Zuckerberg needs Reels to fund his metaverse... And you can smell his desperation from Beijing” Great piece by @sarahfrier @BradStone @technology https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
By spring 2022, Meta's TikTok problem had moved from earnings-call language to product strategy. The company's dismal February earnings report had already framed TikTok as the central competitive threat, and a Vox analysis found most top-viewed Reels were anonymous reposts rather than original creator work — meaning the format was growing without the creator base that made TikTok sticky.
The Bloomberg piece shows Meta's response operating at the individual level: Instagram staff personally recruiting mid-tier creators like Justina Sharp (93,000 followers) to build audiences on-platform. Weeks later, an internal memo laid out plans to remake Facebook itself in TikTok's image, confirming this was a company-wide pivot, not an Instagram-side experiment.
First-order effects
- Instagram is now spending recruiter-level attention on individual creators — Sharp's outreach shows Meta treating audience supply, not just features, as the scarce resource in the Reels push.
Second-order effects
- TikTok's growth forces Meta to accept format convergence: the June memo's plan to surface 'unconnected' recommended posts means Facebook abandons its friend-graph identity to match a rival's distribution model.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, short-video economics decide where Zuckerberg's metaverse funding comes from — Reels engagement has to close the gap before the next platform bet can be financed, which is why later internal documents tracked Reels watch-time against TikTok hour by hour.
The trend: Social platforms are converging on TikTok's algorithmic, unconnected-content model, with creator recruitment and ad revenue from short video becoming the funding engine for each company's next platform bet.