Your Facebook feed is changing again, with the meta-owned platform seeking to change its approach in line with evolving media spending behavior.
According to a Internal overview from Tom Allison, head of the Facebook appWhich was obtained by Edge, Meta wants to include more AI-suggested content in the Facebook feed, based on overall engagement and popularity, not your personal connections. Which is similar to the source of TikTok content from a larger pool than your instant network, while Facebook is also working to streamline content sharing by bringing more messaging tools back to the main interface.
Explained by Meta:
“Home Experience will strike a balance between both connected content and unconnected content. We’re working on clearing the top-of-feed and making it as easy to see stories from friends as it is to relay new content. We’re also exploring a community panel to give you direct access to the communities you value most. Finally, we’re testing a product to give you approximate access to your linked feed, including the ability to sort in chronological order and the ability to filter by group, page and friends. Internally we call it “Mr. T” and I’m excited about the progress the team is making. “
Which, of course, made the video an overnight sensation.
Edge The updated Facebook feed provides its own overview of how it works:
“T.Its main tab will be a mix of stories and reels at the top, followed by its search engine recommended posts from both Facebook and Instagram. This post will be a more visual, video-heavy experience with a clear prompt for direct messaging to friends. To make messaging more prominent, Facebook is working to place the user’s Messenger inbox in the upper right of the app, undoing the infamous decision to separate the two apps eight years ago.“
The updated strategic transition is fully influenced by TickTock, which continues to gain more usage speed to the detriment of Meter’s own apps. These trends are now very significant and cannot be ignored – and not just the focus on short-form video, but the larger habitual change that occurs due to this, in terms of loss of attention span and new user habits, as indicated by the tick’s mandatory ‘for you’. Feeding.
If it is not already clear what the meta tick is doing to keep pace, it will become much clearer based on the proposed changes to your main feed.
In his brief overview of strategic priorities for the app, Allison outlines a proposed shift toward discovering AI-fueled content based on your interests, as opposed to sharing with your friends.
“Historically, Facebook has adopted an entity-centric approach to discovery. We help you connect with friends, groups, and your favorite pages, then place updates from those links into the feed. Unconnected content in the feed was republished from friends, groups, and pages you follow, but unconnected recommendations have historically not been a core part of the feed experience. However, we’ve invested heavily in adjacent surfaces, such as search queries or recommendation-first products, such as the Watch, News, and Marketplace.
Shift, which Allison describes as a ‘discovery engine’ method, will aim to highlight more interesting content in the app, ‘whether it was created by someone you’re connected to or not’.
Meta is already investing in this front, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted Q1 earnings call That:
“While we’re seeing an increase in short-form video, we’re also seeing a big change in feeds that are almost exclusively curated by your social graph or following the graph. Now you have more feeds suggested by AI, even if the content is a friend or you follow. No one posted that. The social content of friends and individuals and businesses that you follow will continue to be a valuable, engaging and unique content for our service, but now being able to accurately recommend content from all over the universe that you do not follow directly is an unlocked lot of interesting and useful videos and Posts that you might otherwise miss. “
It follows TikTok’s lead in surfacing more content, a great experience for creators (who get more views) and users (who get access to more comprehensive content), but it’s a fundamental change from Facebook’s long-standing core. The difference – it has the largest user base of any platform, which is why it is so valuable as a connectivity tool.
TikTok has ignored this, and platforms like Reddit have long capitalized on crowd-source recommendations. Or communities.
This has greatly diminished the power of Facebook, and the app has remained a key connectivity tool, and it now seeks to develop its systems in line with this new paradigm shift.
A key focus on this topic, of course, is the reels, which are meta Fast-growing content options.
Reels already make up more than 20% of the time people spend on Instagram, while videos make up 50% of the time people spend on Facebook overall. And now, according to Allison’s outline, Facebook will look to lean more towards it.
“Today’s public short-form video genre opens up new ways for people to create and discover content. While Facebook’s search engine is designed to support a variety of formats (text, photo, video, and finally the Metavers experience), our biggest gap is the proximity to short-form video, and that’s why we integrate reels into Home, Watch, and In. I’m focusing on – feed recommendations, and groups. “
In other words, expect a lot more reels in Facebook apps, in many more places.
If you do not like short-form video, you are now in the minority, and again, the habitual change that has resulted from the emergence of short content means that all video platforms have to adapt to this new usage behavior, or risk losing viewers.
This will require a significant shift from Meta to Methodology, which, in turn, relies on providing content recommendations based on your explicit interest signals, such as the people, groups and businesses you choose to connect to its apps.
Switching to algorithmic recommendations is much more risky, as it can quickly reduce engagement if it goes wrong. But fixing it, as TickTock has shown, can be a big advantage.
Another key risk for Facebook, however, would be the expansion of more controversial, sensational content, which may perform well in algorithms, but may not be the most fun element to show to its 2.9 billion users.
This is also a problem on TikTok, with users being shown regularly, for example, high sex videos from young creators who are encouraged to post like this for more likes and reach. In some ways, TickTock moves away from these because of its focus on younger audiences, but you can bet that Facebook won’t get the same humility if it starts amplifying algorithmically questioned clips.
Relying more on algorithms can be a big problem for Facebook in this case, as the platform has already been seen as a hotbed of conspiracy theories and misinformation, mainly due to the busyness of the app to see sensational content.
At the moment, Facebook is able to argue that these types of posts are primarily limited to personal sharing, but a more comprehensive algorithm will change that dynamics, and Facebook will push these posts to more users.
Could this be a good approach for Facebook? Time will tell, but I’m willing to bet that this will lead to more problems and worries.
On the other front, Allison further noted that another strategic focus is to help people realize the economic opportunities, long-term trade is an important issue for Meta and Facebook.
“It’s also strategic for the meta because more trading experience on the site helps reduce our advertising signal loss [and] This is one of our main products that has a good market fit with YA. We will continue to invest in both organic and business-driven commercial products, and as we continue our efforts to democratize economic opportunities on Facebook, the opportunity to integrate enjoyable trade experiences into products like Group, Live and more is growing. “
In short, the app has more reels, more product lists, and more content from people you’re not connected to.
This is understandable when considering the larger web engagement trend, but there are some big risks for Facebook, which could backfire on the app.