Wait till next year if you already feel strongly about your Instagram feed featuring more and more Reels from accounts you don’t follow.
By the end of 2023, according to Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, the firm will more than increase the quantity of content from suggested accounts users view on Facebook and Instagram. According to him, such recommendations currently make up about 15% of the content on Facebook, and Instagram already has a bigger percentage.
The initiative is a major change from Facebook and Instagram’s past emphasis on showing postings from a user’s social graph, or list of friends. Zuckerberg refers to it as constructing the “Discovery Engine.” The change aims to compete with TikTok’s extensive usage of AI to serve up videos from everywhere. Due to this strategy, TikTok has become one of the most popular apps in the world and has given rise to an entirely new creator economy.
Zuckerberg noted that as “Al finds extra information that people find fascinating, it enhances engagement and the quality of our feeds” during Meta’s second quarter earnings call on Wednesday. He asserted that Meta will employ AI to suggest all publicly shared items on its service, such as links or photos.
“In that sense, I think what we’re doing is going to be pretty unique,” he said, alluding to TikTok’s singular focus on short videos. “I don’t think people are going to want to be constrained to one format.”
- Facebook redesigns its home feed to emphasize ‘personalized recommendations’ a la TikTok.
- Instagram is testing a tool that uses AI to scan your face and determine your age.
Facebook’s last big shift in how it recommends content was in 2018, when Zuckerberg announced a strategy focused on encouraging “meaningful social interactions” (MSI) between friends in the News Feed. When it was introduced, Zuckerberg predicted that it would lead to a decrease in time spent on the social network but leave users feeling better.
“The research shows that when we use social media to connect with people we care about, it can be good for our well-being,” he said at the time. “On the other hand, passively reading articles or watching videos — even if they’re entertaining or informative — may not be as good.”
Now that Meta’s business is slowing and Facebook’s user base is aging, Zuckerberg appears to be throwing out the past four years of how the feed was architected. On Wednesday, he said that people were shifting away from sharing in feeds altogether and instead communicating over private messages.
“One social trend that we’re seeing is that instead of people just interacting in comments in feeds, most people find interesting content in their feeds and then message that content to friends and interact there.”
