Facebook expands Lasso’s presence to more countries in Latin America in hopes of competing against Tik-Tok.
After testing the Lasso application in Mexico, Colombia, and the United States, Facebook has decided to expand the distribution of the app to ten other countries in the region, as reported by the company in a press release.
In November 2018, Facebook presented Lasso as a response to the popularity that Tik-Tok, the Chinese competitor that is conquering centennials, also known as Generation Z, is gaining.
Lasso has been tested in some of the countries where Facebook has the most extensive presence, and in recent days it has been presented to more countries in Latin America.
What is Lasso?
Facebook describes Lasso as a standalone application” that allows people to express themselves with fun, short videos of up to 26 seconds.” Meanwhile, the media represents the app as “the Tik-Tok clone.”
As with Tik-Tok, in Lasso, users have the option to create videos with fun filters and effects, join hashtag challenges, select songs from a catalog of millions of titles, easily share the videos on Facebook and Instagram Stories and more.”
Can Lasso dethrone Tik-Tok?
In a leaked conversation from the company, Mark Zuckerberg compared Tik-Tok as “the browsing tab we have on Instagram,” which some commentators saw as a sign of how little understanding Facebook has of Tik-Tok’s success.
For Tech Crunch journalist Josh Coshtine, Tik-Tok’s success is due, in part, to its content being premeditated and scripted from the start, contrasting with disorganized Instagram stories.
This difference in the quality of the content has been reflected in the performance of Tik-Tok, compared to the Facebook product. In the period from November 2018 to October 2019, Lasso was installed 425K times, while in the same period, Tik-Tok was installed 640M times outside of China.
According to an internal Tik-Tok Marketing report published by AdAge, this app and its Chinese version (Douyin) had 800M active users. This figure not only far exceeds Lasso, but puts this social network very close to Instagram, which in June 2018 had a billion active users globally.
Tik-Tok is a growing network in the broad sense. Launched since 2016, the demographic sector with the most users of this app are teenagers between 13 and 17 years old. The company has managed to grow in the United States thanks to this sector. A YouGov survey found that among teens in the United States, 2% rank this app as the most-used social media platform.
For Business Insider’s Andrew Meola, the app’s popularity will accelerate in 2020, providing an excellent opportunity for advertisers and marketers to position their brands with Gen Z.
Facebook probably lost valuable time to preserve the Asian market, where Tik-Tok is most popular, but there is still time to retain its influence in Latin America.
Lasso Regional Launch: Facebook’s Strategy
With the popularity of Tik-Tok, characterized by short videos, increasing, Facebook began testing its new Lasso application in Mexico, Colombia, and the United States.
Testing has led to a collaboration with a variety of content creators to learn from them, collect feedback, and create new in-app experiences.
The bet for Latin America is because the company already has a strong community around video on Facebook. For this reason, in recent weeks, Facebook began to expand the application to more countries in the region.
Lasso is currently available in 13 Latin American countries, including Argentina, Chile, Peru, Guatemala, Ecuador, Honduras, Paraguay, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Panama, and Uruguay.
“We have seen communities grow and connect using Lasso’s short-form videos, and we are excited to offer more people in Latin America new creative ways to express themselves with the app.”
Luz Landa, Manager of strategic alliances with content creators and public figures.
In the coming months, we will continue to collaborate with more creators from the region to listen and learn about how these communities interact with Lasso.
How does Lasso work?
To start using Lasso, people only need to download the application, available on iOS and Android, and log in with their Facebook or Instagram account.
These are some of the characteristics of the new social network launched by Facebook:
- Standalone app – An app where you can create and view vertical short-form videos of 26 seconds or less on topics ranging from comedy and beauty to music, fashion, and more.
- Music: Lasso has millions of songs to choose from, just tap on the music note icon to search for a song.
- Easy to share: People will be able to share their Lasso videos in their Stories on Facebook and Instagram.
- Production features: you can choose different speeds (.1x, .5x, 1x, 2x, 3x), shoot in different segments, add a GIF as a clip within a video, camera effects (virtual reality effects and facial filters) .
- Hashtags and challenges: Lasso lets you know which hashtags are in fashion so you can create a video.