Meta has long outlived competition by either buying the platform or by introducing matching features that are popular among users. So far, this trick has worked well with WhatsApp, Instagram, and Snapchat. But now, another social media platform has grabbed everyone’s attention and has become a major threat to the company. Meta has already accepted TikTok as its competition. Also Read – Meta Rolls Out Voice Mode in Horizon Worlds: View Details
“The first is competition. People have a lot of choices about how they want to spend their time and apps like TikTok are growing very quickly. And that’s why our focus on the reels is so important over the long term. As this It’s our job to make sure our apps are the best services for young adults, which I talked about on my last call,” Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg told investors in an earnings call earlier this year. Also Read – WhatsApp Now Lets You Transfer Your Chats From Android to iPhone, Says Mark Zuckerberg
Now the company has come up with a plan to compete with Tiktok. Also Read – Facebook Accused Of ‘Promoting, Abetting Violence’ In Rohingya Genocide: Report
In an internal memo obtained by The Verge, the Facebook app’s executive in charge of Meta, Tom Ellison, highlights the precise steps the company needs to take to compete with ByteDance’s TikTok. “The risk to us is that we don’t see it as valuable to people as social communication and connection and we fail to develop,” Ellison wrote in a memo to employees.
Allison’s mandate to employees is clear: make the reels a success, build world-class recommendation technology, and unlock message-based sharing. Allison pointed to the company’s declining popularity among younger users, saying, “They also represent some of the biggest — but most challenging — opportunities to succeed with young adults.”
As part of the changes, Facebook will put more emphasis on reels, bring Messenger back to the main app (shutdown it as a separate app after nearly eight years), and recommend posts regardless of people’s posts. Instead of where are you coming from) which users follow.
In the memo, Allison also talks about building something called the ‘Discovery Engine’. “In this note I want to introduce Facebook’s concept as a “discovery engine,” a helpful mental model to frame the current focus of our long-term strategy. It also helps contextualize our product priorities. which we will continue to develop over time to emphasize our near-term focus areas,” he wrote in the post, adding, “Today we are witnessing a shift towards social media products that serve as “discovery engines”. Working as… We are sharing an updated expression of our near-term priorities that aim to strengthen the Facebook Discovery Engine.”
Now, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard of a Discovery engine. This was first mentioned by Zuckerberg on an investors call earlier this year. “Overall, I think of AI that we are building not only as a recommendation system for short-form videos, but as a discovery engine that can show you the most interesting content that people have found. Our system is shared in Facebook, which includes not only videos but also text posts, links, group posts, reshares and more,” she said at the time. Simply put, Meta is an AI-based recommendation system. is building that will bring new (and perhaps younger users) to the platform and keep the company’s existing users on the platform. Whether this plan will actually work remains to be seen.