Facebook announced today the addition of two feeds to its iOS and Android apps. Home is the new name for the first tab you see when you start the app, and it is intended for algorithm-based discovery with Reels, Stories, and other tailored content. Then there’s a brand-new Feeds option with recent postings from friends, groups, Facebook Pages, and favorites, but no “Suggested For You” entries.
The two tabs will be available in both the iOS and Android versions of the Facebook app, where they will be visible in the shortcut bar starting today. According to Meta’s news release, the contents of this bar are intended to alter depending on which tabs users spend the most time in, however, tabs can be pinned to ensure their positions do not move. The upgrades are expected to be carried out globally over the next week, according to the business.
Splitting the feed in this way appears to be an attempt to strike a balance between Meta’s desire for Facebook to become more like TikTok — which recommends content from across its platform based on what its algorithms think you might be interested in — and Facebook’s historical focus on the accounts and pages that people actually follow. However, making the newly renamed Home feed the default demonstrates Meta’s goals for Facebook, and Meta states that the feed will become “more of a discovery engine” in the future.
It’s crucial to clarify that postings from friends and family will still appear on the Home tab, but they’ll be surrounded by suggestions determined by a machine learning rating system. There will also be advertisements in the Feed tab. So it appears that there will be some crossover between the two.
The shift demonstrates how much Facebook’s primary News Feed has evolved over the years in response to evolving trends from other social media platforms. TikTok will be a serious challenge in 2022. Meta’s attempt to clone the social networking platform with Lasso failed after only 18 months, and the company’s focus has since switched to Instagram’s Reels in order to profit from the popularity of the short-form video format.
However, the threat posed by TikTok has not subsided. Facebook, the company’s main social media site, lost daily users for the first time in 2021, and while it returned to growth in the first quarter of this year, it’s currently expanding slower than ever as TikTok eats into time spent on both it and Instagram. Facebook is laying the ground for its embrace of algorithmically recommended feeds more than ever with today’s updates.
