Instagram To Add New Features To Compete With TikTok, YouTube

(RTTNews) - Instagram, the social networking app owned by Facebook Inc. (FB), has announced it will make changes to how it recommends and shows videos to its users.

Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri, in a video said, that Instagram plans to show users full-screen videos in their feeds, and also recommend videos from accounts they do not already follow. Users will start to seeing changes in couple of months, he said.

"We're no longer a photo-sharing app or a square photo-sharing app," Mosseri said. "The number one reason people say that they use Instagram, in research, is to be entertained. So people are looking to us for that."

According to Mosseri, the changes are being made to directly compete with TikTok as well as YouTube, which is owned by Google. "Let's be honest, there's some really serious competition right now. TikTok is huge, YouTube is even bigger, and there's lots of other upstarts as well," he said. "People are looking to Instagram to be entertained, there's stiff competition and there's more to do. We have to embrace that, and that means change."

"We're also going to be experimenting with how do we embrace video more broadly -- full screen, immersive, entertaining, mobile-first video. You'll see us do a number of things, or experiment with a number of things in this space over the coming months," Mosseri added.

In August last year, Instagram had launched Reels, a feature that allows users to record 15 to 30-second clips set to music and other effects, as an effort to directly take on TikTok.