The main feed on Facebook will now be called “Home,” and will be a place where people “discover new content” that matches their interests.
According to Bloomberg, Meta is changing the way top social media posts and videos are displayed in an effort to get users to see content from accounts they don’t follow. This is seen as a way for Meta to compete directly with the short video application TikTok, which has expanded a lot during the past time.
The main feed on Facebook will now be called “Home,” and will be a place where people “discover new content” that matches their interests, according to a Meta rep. Photos and videos will then be selected by software algorithms and display only interest-based content, from both following and non-following user accounts.
This change will start today, but most of the content still comes from accounts that users follow. Meta says it will improve the algorithm and increase the visible content gradually over time.
A new tab, called “Feeds”, will only show posts from friends, family, pages and groups that the user chooses to follow. The latest content will appear at the top.
“Home” will be personalized only for you. This system, based on thousands of signals, will help remove irrelevant content and put them in the appropriate order.
Facebook is about to become the ‘second TikTok’: Sudden feed changes, showing only interest-based content to retain users
According to Bloomberg, Facebook user growth has slowed in recent years in the US and European markets. Meanwhile, TikTok, a rival that almost entirely acquires young users, has seen a significant increase in the number of users and time spent on the application. Facebook accordingly was forced to adapt to once again attract the audience it had forgotten.
TikTok has a main feed called “For You”, which shows short-form videos to users based on their likes on the platform. Typically, these videos come from accounts that users don’t directly follow but whose content is relevant to their interests. In addition, users also have another feed to see only videos from the following account.
This approach has helped TikTok own up to 1 billion monthly users in just 4 years. The number of accounts is only about a quarter of that of Facebook (about 2.9 billion people), but this social network user in the US spends an average of 29 hours a month watching TikTok, which is almost twice the time spent on TikTok. Facebook.
This success made billionaire Mark Zuckerberg forced to admit, then hastily launched Reels – a feature to watch short videos similar to TikTok, integrated on both Facebook and Instagram. Meta also tries to attract creative users from the “Story” feature in order to keep them on the app for as long as possible.
Facebook user growth has slowed in recent years in the US and European markets.
Every video posted to Instagram that is less than 15 minutes in length is automatically labeled as Story. Instagram says that if the video was created by a public account and is less than 90 seconds long, it will be eligible to appear on accounts that users don’t follow. This shows that Meta is very focused on Reels, more than other previous video initiatives like IGTV, which were meant to compete with YouTube.
It is known that TikTok is being noticed by the regulator – an opportunity for Meta to regain its former golden years. In addition, the group also had billions of dollars in cash (more than $43 billion in detail) and cash equivalents as of March 31. This could help Meta cushion the blow from a major downturn in online ad spending.
Source: Bloomberg
