(Image credit: Dawid Sokołowski/Solen Feyissa via Unsplash)
Big changes could be coming to the way your Facebook feed works. A leaked memo has revealed that Meta employees have been given a directive to make the Facebook news feed more like TikTok’s, in an effort to tempt back younger users.
While Meta as a company is pivoting largely towards Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of the metaverse (check our our article explaining what is the metaverse if you’re still confused by the whole thing), Facebook continues to be an important part of funding that dream.
A memo, sent in late April by Meta’s executive in charge of Facebook, Tom Alison, was obtained by The Verge, and elucidates what the top strategic brains at the social network are thinking.
"The risk for us is that we dismiss this as being not valuable to people as a form of social communication and connection and we fail to evolve," Alison reportedly said in the memo.
Expect the feed to change significantly in coming months (Image credit: Joshua Hoehne via Unsplash)
The plan: rejig the news feed by de-emphasising posts from accounts that a user follows, and start recommending posts regardless of where they come from. This is a large part of how TikTok’s lightning-fast viral cycle works, and why it’s not uncommon to see videos from wildly different corners of TikTok in your For You tab.
Also, eight years after the Facebook messaging function was split off into its own app, it’s going to be brought back into the fold, with messaging reappearing in the main Facebook app. Again, this appears to be a response to the increased importance of private messaging on TikTok.
Meta has already been hard at work competing with TikTok, with Instagram Reels gaining a greater and greater prominence in users’ feeds, irrespective of whether that is something they want. Check out our comparison of Reels vs TikTok to get an idea of how the two compare.
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Indeed, if you’re a creative promoting work on Instagram, it’s basically a fact at this point that you need to be making plenty of Reels to have a hope of your content reaching audiences – take a look at our guide to how to edit video for Instagram if you need a few pointers there.
Instagram Reels have already been a big part of Meta taking on TikTok. (Image credit: Facebook)
It looks like future versions of the Facebook feed are therefore going to be a lot more video-heavy, with a section for Stories and Reels at the top, and then a discovery engine that recommends content from all corners of both Facebook and Instagram. If you use these platforms to promote and share your creative work, then it’s best to start preparing for all your posting strategies to change. Again.
If you want to give your brand a refresh ahead of the Big TikTok Pivot, then check out our guide to the best website builders. And if you, like ol’ Zuckers, are helplessly enraptured by the idea of the metaverse, then you may also be interested in the best VR apps.
Jon is a freelance writer and journalist who covers photography, art, technology, and the intersection of all three. When he's not scouting out news on the latest gadgets, he likes to play around with film cameras that were manufactured before he was born. To that end, he never goes anywhere without his Olympus XA2, loaded with a fresh roll of Kodak (Gold 200 is the best, since you asked). Jon is a regular contributor to Creative Bloq, and has also written for in Digital Camera World, Black + White Photography Magazine, Photomonitor, Outdoor Photography, Shortlist and probably a few others he's forgetting.
