Facebook has split the News Feed into two separate sections, one dedicated to posts, videos, stories, and similar TikTok-style content.
- Facebook has announced that its powerful news feed will be split into two separate tabs, Home and Feeds, to better separate opening from friends’ posts.
- These two tabs began rolling out to the Facebook mobile app on July 21, 2022. It may take a week or two for the changes to affect all users of the application.
- Meta, Facebook’s parent company, seems hesitant in the face of strong competition. The company has changed its Instagram and Facebook apps to provide more TikTok-like full-screen entertainment.
Facebook news feed split into two new sections
According to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a Facebook post, making sure people don’t miss friends’ posts has been one of the most requested features for Facebook. That’s why the company is introducing a new “Feeds”tab next to the “Home”tab.
Home feed opens by default
Videos, stories, and other posts from friends and family on the Home tab are surrounded by personalized content recommendations that Facebook’s machine-learning search engine thinks you’ll be most interested in. Zuckerberg says the mobile app will still open a personalized feed in the Home tab. In fact, the Home feed should be “more of an engine of discovery”in the future.
Channels tab: Posts from pages you actually follow.
The new Channels tab displays the latest posts from pages you follow, as well as posts from your friends and groups you’re a member of. According to Zuckerberg, there will still be ads in the Feeds tab, but there will be no “Featured for You”posts. The Channels tab is sorted chronologically, and you have the ability to further customize and control your experience. For example, you can sort content in the Channels tab by Favorites, Friends, Groups, Pages, and more, just like before this change.
When will these changes take effect?
Once these individual channels are up and running in your copy of the Facebook app [ App Store link ], you will be able to switch between the two sections by holding down the navigation bar at the bottom. Meta expects the changes to be rolled out globally within the next week.
Facebook becomes a ghost town
The almighty news feed has been Facebook’s secret weapon for keeping users on the platform. But the advent of social media apps like Snapchat and TikTok has hurt the blue app a lot. Facebook has an aging user base as most of the youth have left the platform. They now use Snapchat to chat and share photos, and TikTok to get their daily dose of cool videos. And Meta can’t offer them anything like these apps. That’s why the company resorted to what it does best: shameless copying.
Fight to compete with TikTok
TikTok has become such a huge global phenomenon and the Met got fed up with it, so they decided to copy the full screen concept of TikTok and focus on video entertainment. The company appears to be heavily reliant on algorithmically recommended channels to slow down TikTok’s progress. Read: How to Permanently Delete Your Facebook Account
Will competition for copying be justified in the end?
Instagram has made similar changes to make it more like TikTok. Recently, for example, it launched new chronological “Following”and “Favorites”feeds that show you the latest posts from your followers and favorite accounts. And now the same process of mimicking the TikTok approach is happening on Facebook. Whether this strategy will pay any dividends in the future remains to be seen, but the clock is ticking for the blue app, which actually lost daily users for the first time in the last quarter of 2021.