Improve onboarding in Reels for small businesses

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Meta is a social technology company; its products include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Threads, Quest, creator tools, and ads.

Meta Reels is a short-form video surface where people discover entertainment, creators, brands, and local businesses across Facebook and Instagram. Small businesses increasingly use Reels to reach customers, show products, explain services, and drive discovery, but many do not have dedicated marketing teams, video production skills, or time to learn a complex creation workflow.

Your task is to improve the onboarding experience for small businesses that are new to using Reels as a business growth channel. Focus on the early journey: from understanding why Reels is relevant, to creating or publishing initial content, to feeling confident that Reels can help the business reach the right audience. The design should account for different types of small businesses, such as local services, restaurants, retail shops, solo entrepreneurs, and online sellers.

This is a product design problem, not an ads strategy problem. You may consider how organic reach, business profiles, creator tools, insights, and eventual promotion paths fit into the experience, but the core focus should be reducing onboarding friction and helping a small business successfully begin using Reels.

The experience should consider:

- The specific small-business users involved, such as owners, employees, freelancers, or social media managers, and their varying levels of time, confidence, and content skill.

- The end-to-end onboarding workflow, including discovery, education, setup, content creation, publishing, and early feedback.

- Key pain points, such as not knowing what to post, fear of low-quality content, unclear business value, limited creative assets, or confusion between personal and business accounts.

- How Meta’s social graph, recommendations, business tools, and insights could support the experience without overwhelming new users.

- Differences between onboarding a brand-new business user and helping an existing Instagram or Facebook business account adopt Reels.

- Trust, safety, authenticity, music/licensing, privacy, and brand suitability concerns for businesses posting public video.

- How the product could signal progress, confidence, and value in the first few sessions without requiring paid advertising.

- How success might differ by business category, geography, audience size, and maturity of the business’s social presence.

The goal is to define a focused product experience that helps small businesses understand, start, and continue using Reels effectively, while balancing ease of use, creative quality, business outcomes, and Meta’s broader ecosystem strengths.