YouTube Shorts, TikTok and Instagram Reels have many similarities when it comes to creating, viewing and sharing content. But which one has been the most successful with its audience?

TikTok was formerly known as Musical.ly which provided users with a list of popular songs for which they could choose shorter sections to lip-sync to. The famous app was then merged with ‘TikTok’ where content creators carried on posting in the newly renamed app. The app has now been downloaded more than 2 billion times. It has more users than Pinterest and Twitter and is poised to overtake Snapchat by 2023. User engagement is high on TikTok, so good content has a great opportunity to spread to a wider audience. They have recently added a new feature for content creators to film a video that can last up to 10 minutes. Do people like the app because it's easy to use or do people want longer content videos from their favorite creators?

As Instagram has been known to do from time to time, it has . . . ahem . . . “borrowed” a winning format from another social media competitor and made it its own. Instagram created a feature inside the app called ‘reels’.  It allows users to create engaging and fun video content to post. Now believe it or not reels has a total of 1 billion users. Instagram has been heavily pushing reeling and we've seen a much higher engagement on them compared to other medita types. We highly recommend making them part of your strategy today. You can can find a helpful guid to get started here.

In a nutshell, YouTube Shorts is YouTube’s answer to the short-form video trend that was first made popular by TikTok and was adopted by Instagram. Shorts enables creators to record, edit and share short, vertical video content that connects them to YouTube’s 2 billion users. YouTube Shorts experience more than 6.5 billion daily views globally. YouTube currently does not allow creators to monetize their Shorts through ad partners. But with their YouTube partner program surely it is only a matter of time before users can do so and will help increase their share of the shorts market. As is true with TikTok and Reels, YouTube app users can simply scroll from video to video while using the Shorts section of the app.

All in all, YouTube Shorts presents an inviting new alternative for short video creation. Though it definitely has its pros and cons with yet another platform to discover and broadcast videos in an engaging and interactive way, but is certainly on its way to becoming a popular competitor in the short-video space. Instagram Reels is the best alternative to TikTok as it's very similar in the way you can interact on the app with friends. Although both YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels have been successful since they've launched, both platforms have an extremely long way to go if they want to catch up to TikTok’s success.