When you think about Facebook, a 20-year-old social network, such is its popularity among “young people”. what comes to mind Of course, Meta wants to change that, and the company once again tells the world it intends to reorient its platform to appeal to this demographic.
In Tom Alison, who runs the Facebook app for Meta, says the service is changing to reflect “an increased focus on youth” compared to other users. “Facebook is still for everyone, but we’ve made significant changes with young people in mind to create for the next generation of social media consumers,” he said.
If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because Meta executives have been trying to win over the “youngsters” for years to better compete with TikTok. Mark Zuckerberg almost said before he said he wanted to make young adults the “North Star” of the company. Alison and Zuckerberg both talk about the Facebook app becoming aa not a feed based on users’ connections.
This change is now well underway. Alison said the company’s advances in artificial intelligence have already improved recommendations for Reels and feeds, and that “advanced recommendation technology will power even more products next year.” He added that private sharing between users is also on the rise, with more users sharing videos (although there is no word on plan to switch messaging back to the main app).
Note that Alison’s note does not mention the “metaverse,” which Zuckerberg once saw as central to the company’s future. Instead, he says, “the trend toward new product opportunities enabled by AI” is an important goal, along with attracting younger users. It’s no surprise, either, given that Meta and Zuckerberg recently tried Some of the company’s metaverse ambitions, such as AI developments.
But it is also unclear how successful Meta will be in its efforts to attract young people. While Alison said Facebook has seen “five-quarters of the healthy growth in app usage among young adults in the US and Canada” with 40 million young adult daily active users, that’s still a relatively small percentage of the 205 million US Facebook users. In February, it last released user numbers for the app.
