- Kyle Chua
Meta Splits Facebook News Feed Into Two in Bid To Become More Like TikTok
Meta is redesigning the Facebook app’s News Feed in a way that seemingly imitates TikTok’s approach of using algorithms to recommend content on the platform.
In a blog post, the social media giant announced it’s splitting the News Feed into two: Home and Feeds.
Home is supposedly designed to be a "discovery engine", showing Reels, Stories and other types of personalised content that the algorithm thinks you’ll enjoy. It’s the tab you see first when you open the Facebook app. Here, you can also create Reels, see what your friends are sharing on their Feeds and build communities over shared interests.
Feeds, meanwhile, is where you’ll find the latest from your friends, Favourites, Pages and groups. This is the place to access content from your existing connections. The tab won't have Suggested For You posts, but does contain advertisements.
"One of the most requested features for Facebook is to make sure people don’t miss friends’ posts," wrote Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a post. "So today we’re launching a Feeds tab where you can see posts from your friends, groups, Pages and more separately in chronological order. The app will still open to a personalised feed on the Home tab, where our discovery engine will recommend the content we think you’ll care most about."
When it comes to how the algorithm works in the Home tab, Meta said the machine learning artificial intelligence uses a ranking system which takes into account "thousands of signals" to cut through the clutter and serve content you'll find valuable. This includes content from users or Pages that you have yet to follow.
Facebook has recently been grappling with an ageing user base as more teenagers and young adults leave for TikTok. The platform's overall growth is also slower than ever, with it losing daily users in the first quarter of 2021. So this latest move is clearly an attempt by Meta to help Facebook stay competitive against TikTok, which has in some aspect overtaken its years-long dominance in the social media space.
TikTok uses the same algorithm-based recommendations on its platform, showing you short-form videos that align with your interests almost as soon as you open the app. And it seems to be a hit among younger users. Facebook is now trying the same in the hope of luring this demographic back.
The redesign started rolling out today and is expected to be available globally on both iOS and Android by next week.
Meta has split the Facebook app's News Feed into two: Home and Feeds.
Home is supposedly designed as a "discovery engine", showing Reels, Stories, and other types of personalised content that the algorithm thinks you’ll enjoy.
Feeds, meanwhile, is where you’ll find the latest from your friends, Favourites, Pages and groups.
The redesign started rolling out today and is expected to be available globally on both iOS and Android by next week.