Meta Meets Developers’ Demand for New Instagram Reels APIs

After being clued in that Reels are crucial, Meta has introduced the new Reels APIs for its photo and video-sharing social networking service, Instagram’s developer community. 

In a blog post, Meta said,

Beginning tomorrow, June 28, 2022, we will begin introducing Reels to several endpoints on the Instagram Platform.

We are always looking to improve our content publishing and consumption experiences, whether people use Instagram natively or via a third party. After consistently hearing from our developer community that Reels is a top priority, we are excited to introduce Reels to a number of the endpoints that you may already be familiar with,

the company added. 

Meta extensively supports the short-form video feature, so it introduced the Reels APIs. Just post the launch, about 25% of Instagram user accounts have attained access to all the Reels APIs, and by July 6, the entire 100% will gradually roll out. 

Including the Graph API’s current version, this API improvement will also be available to all the previous versions. According to Meta, for metaverse developers who already hold access to the pertinent APIs, Reels will automatically be available to them. 

Here, a goal to be achieved is to improve the experience of Insta users concerning insights, content publishing, hashtag search, comment moderation, mentions, business discovery, and a lot more, whether they use it natively or via a third party. And if the permission access levels of the app have been previously authorized, developers would become free from submitting it again for another App Review round. 

Benefits of Reels APIs for Developers

• Developers can schedule Reels and get social media interaction metrics for the Reels. 
• Besides, they can also publish Reels on Instagram Business accounts. 
• Even on Reels, developers can hide/unhide comments, disable/enable comments, delete comments, and reply to comments.
• They can recognize the Reels, tagging or mentioning an Instagram Business or Creator’s alias.

Additionally, Mark Zukerberg highlighted that 18 years ago, since its dawn, Facebook has witnessed various transformations in the types of media used by people, and right now, the short-form is experiencing growth at a faster pace. 

Other than that, he underlined that Meta is glimpsing a drastic change in the advancement of AI recommendations, drawing more of its feeds for Reels and posts. As a part of Q1 of 2022 earnings, the company disclosed that Reels are making around 20% more of the time people spend on Instagram. 

Meta emphasizes enhancing its recommendation systems to motivate users to increase their interaction with Reels and be competitive with TikTok as it learned that the chief factor contributing to TikTok’s rage is its compelling recommendation algorithm.