To attract a younger audience, Facebook is preparing a complete overhaul of its news feed by promoting the discovery of videos, drawing heavily on TikTok, its much more fashionable Chinese competitor.
Facebook is preparing for a big change. The social network, which has been losing momentum for some time, especially in the face of TikTok, which continues to gain in popularity, is thought to be thinking about a new strategy in order to win back the public. And the Meta group, owner of Facebook – but also WhatsApp and Instagram – would even consider getting closer to the operation of the Chinese application to attract young people. In any case, this is what we learn in an internal note from the company dating from April 2022, recovered by The Vergewhere Tom Alison, the head of the Facebook application, discusses with his teams a major overhaul of the application’s main feed, taking inspiration from TikTok.
Redesign of Facebook: highlighting short videos
In this internal memo, and in principle confidential, Facebook reveals that it wants to focus on recommended content, that is to say that posted by pages or influencers that are not followed by users. Tom Alison says he wants to turn Facebook into a “discovery engine“, a bit like the thread “For you” present on TikTok. Users would therefore find in their news feed Stories (ephemeral videos or photos) of their loved ones, Reels (short videos like on Instagram and TikTok), and content recommended by a kind of “discovery engine” (discovery-engine). Good news for influencers, who will be able to gain followers more easily given that today only about 11% of Facebook’s main feed content is unconnected, and they have mostly surfaced through shares that people perform on their network, not at the company’s AI.
The goal is to strengthen the Reels, which arrived on Facebook a few months ago. Meta had already taken inspiration from its Chinese competitor by recently increasing the duration of Instagram Reels to follow TikTok, which had done the same. Similarly, the application had been equipped with new functions also taken from TikTok, in particular the very practical Sound Sync option, which allows you to automatically synchronize clips and songs. For Tom Alison, “it’s basically a race to see if Facebook can become like TikTok before TikTok doesn’t become like Facebook anymore“.
The return of Messenger in the Facebook app
Another big change mentioned, the reintegration of Messenger into the Facebook application. For the record, instant messaging was separated in 2015 to become an independent mobile application. If so, Facebook would fall in line with Instagram and TikTok’s models.
But all these changes have raised mixed reviews because Facebook would borrow the same system as its competitor. “I think there is a real risk in this approach that we lose sight of our fundamental differentiation (the social graph and human choice) in favor of the hunt for short-term interests and tendencies.“, thus replied a person to the memo from Tom Alison.
Members of the Meta group agree on one point: they didn’t take the threat from TikTok seriously enough. “I think the thing that we probably haven’t fully understood or seen is how social this format could be.l”, explains Tom Alison about the operation of the Chinese application. Half a million Internet users deserted the platform in the last three months of 2021, and the average age of the remaining Internet users is increasing. This observation has sends Meta’s stock price plummeting and investors are beginning to doubt Facebook’s ability to catch up and turn the corner.
One of the downsides of this new system is that it will reduce the visibility of posts from Pages and Followed Friends, who will no longer have priority in the feed. Additionally, there are risks that Facebook’s algorithms further promote misinformation and the proliferation of fake news, a problem the app is already encountering and which has earned it plenty of criticism.