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Meta executive in charge of Facebook, Tom Alison, made his plans clear to employees on pushing the discovery feature on its news feed to work, look, and feel more like TikTok's and re-integrating Facebook and Messenger applications
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An internal memo, seen by The Verge suggests that Meta Platforms owned social media network, Facebook, is planning on building a news feed that is similar to TikTok.
It also suggests re-integrating Facebook and Messenger into a single app. The two platforms have been separated from each other for a while.
Finally, the memo suggests the parent company's intention to double down on Reels. Meta intends not only to push more Reels via its short video sharing platform, Instagram, but make them available across its applications including integration on Facebook’s Home Watch, and Groups sections.
To achieve the results, Meta has asked its employees to work on changing the algorithms and overall design and feel of Facebook’s main feed. The memo suggests that this would mean that Reels and Stories would feature at the very top of a user's application home page (as a carousel), followed by large videos on scroll featured from users an account follows as well as include recommendations on what a user could possibly like.
This format is apparently being adopted in order to increase engagement on the site, and have users share more content with each other.
In 2021, international app market research firm Data.ai (formerly App Annie) reported that barring India, TikTok is the biggest social media app in terms of downloads and usage, in every major market around the world.
This was a clear sign TikTok was expanding its user base rapidly getting new users while also being able to retain older users. According to experts, a large contributing factor to this has been TikTok’s discovery and recommendation engine, which tracks user's interest and exposes them to the kind of content that would keep them hooked.
Facebook now wants to take a leaf out of TikTok's strategy and pose itself as a content discovery platform. The integration of the Facebook and its messenger application will also allow more engagement through sharing.
The development comes at a time when the company is facing accusations of market monopoly, and threatening competition by either acquiring them, or copying their features and effectively making them irrelevant.
Since 2019’s Big Tech antitrust hearing at the US Senate, Facebook has been singling out TikTok as its clear and major competition around the world, According to Statista, TikTok had over 1 billion monthly active users (MAUs) at the end of 2021 in comparison to Facebook's 2.9 billion, WhatsApp's 2 billion, and Instagram's 1 billion MAUs at the same time.