Facebook is changing the way it shows users posts and videos – to keep them in the app longer – Canada Express News

Facebook parent Meta Platforms is changing the way it shows users posts and videos on its flagship social network, as part of an effort to let people watch content from accounts they don’t already follow and compete better with the video app TikTok.

The main feed on Facebook will now be called “Home” and will be a place for people to “discover new content” that Facebook thinks they will like, according to a company blog post. That includes photos and videos selected by software algorithms, which will display content based on the interests of users, both from accounts they follow and accounts they don’t.

The changes will start on Thursday, but most of the content will still come from accounts that track users, a Meta spokeswoman said. The company plans to increase the new content it displays over time as it improves its recommendation algorithm.

A new tab called ‘Feeds’ shows only posts from friends, family, pages and groups that a person has chosen to follow, with the most recent content at the top.

“Your Home tab is uniquely personalized for you,” the company explained in its blog. “This system takes into account thousands of cues to cut through the clutter and arrange content in the order we think you’ll find most valuable.”

Facebook’s user growth has stalled in the US and Europe in recent years. Competitor TikTok, known for its younger audience, has seen significant growth in the number of users and time spent on the app in the US. In turn, Facebook has worked to attract young people — a group that Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has called the company’s “North Star.”

TikTok, whose main feed is called the “For You” page, serves short videos to users using the algorithm that differentiates their likes and dislikes from their activity on the platform. Usually, these videos come from accounts that don’t follow users directly, but whose content matches their interests.

This personalized approach has helped to catapult TikTok to 1 billion monthly users in just four years. While TikTok only has about a third of Facebook’s 2.9 billion users, the average American TikToker spends 29 hours per month on the app, nearly double Facebook’s 16 hours, according to mobile researcher Data.ai.

Zuckerberg has acknowledged TikTok’s success in recent earnings calls and has aggressively pushed his own version of TikTok’s short videos, called Reels, on both Facebook and Instagram. Part of Meta’s strategy was also to attract creators to create quality videos that originated on Reels.

One of the goals of the new feed is to keep Facebook users on the app longer by adding more original content and a wider range of accounts.

Any video someone posts on Instagram that is less than 15 minutes in length is automatically named Reel. If it’s created by a public account and takes less than 90 seconds, it’s eligible for distribution outside of the person’s followers, Instagram said. The move signals that Reels are now strategically more important to the company than its other video initiatives, such as IGTV, which launched in 2018 to compete with YouTube.

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