Facebook is becoming a “discovery engine”

Facebook just announced some major changes, and you’ll notice that your feed will soon look a lot more like TikTok:

The feed will include a vertical display of public posts — mostly video — that are suggested to a user algorithmically based on the type of content Facebook thinks a user is most likely to enjoy and engage with.

Users can access Reels, Facebook's TikTok-like video feature, and Stories, Facebook's Snapchat-like ephemeral content feature, from the Home screen.

You’ll also see a new Feeds tab on your screen, where you can (with just a few, non-intuitive clicks) filter out the suggested content and just see posts from your friends, if you choose. (Along with ads, we’re guessing.) And Facebook is deprioritizing news content and audio/podcast content, too, to become a “destination platform” where their users discover cool trends, products, and ideas.

This is all over the news, and not just because when you open the app things will look different. Facebook has been slowly copying TikTok for years now, but this is a big change; TikTok’s algorithm serves up content that is supposed to be highly personalized and curated to your specific preferences and behaviors, and that isn’t content consumed by or shared by your friends. Facebook used to prioritize “quality interactions” with your network, but we’re long past that now (although the Feeds tab and the control offered to users is a concession that we might still want to connect with our friends).

This is one of those listening moments that we always talk about. If you’ve been using Facebook and/or Instagram to reach your audience, right now is the time to explore these new changes for yourself, test out posting video content, and use your social listening skills to see if your audience is going to stay on Facebook and Instagram or if they’ll be turned off by all of this and jump to some other platform.

Social media marketers, your priority should be to create content for Facebook and Instagram that users actually want to see, and incentivize them to follow you for more. Getting your users to actually leave platforms like Facebook and Instagram is getting more and more difficult, because these platforms have every incentive to keep users from clicking to another website entirely, so it’s time to play the game.

And we mean it when we say test out video. Both Facebook and Instagram have been promoting video heavily this year, to keep users on the app watching more and more suggested content (and in preparation for this change). You’ve heard us preaching over and over again about making more video, and we hope you’ve been listening, because the days of just posting some words and a link on all of your social channels are nearly gone.

It must be said, too, that there have been a ton of problems with how TikTok’s recommendation algorithm works, including accusations of bias:

While social media companies tend to stay tight-lipped about how their algorithms work, TikTok describes part of their recommendation system as "collaborative filtering" — a system that creates "personalized" recommendations by showing you what other users who like the same things as you also like (yeah, it's the kind of thing that takes a few diagrams to explain.)

Marc Faddoul, an A.I. researcher who raised concerns about racial bias in TikTok's recommendations, told Buzzfeed News that "Collaborative filtering may also reproduce whatever bias there is in people's behavior. People who tend to like blonde teens tend to like a whole lot of other blonde teens."

Will Facebook’s recommendation algorithm have the same sorts of issues? Are they proactively addressing that part of it? Do they care enough to? We’ll have to wait and see.