Facebook Fully Redesigns Its Home Feed To Look Like TikTok
Image via Meta
Joining Instagram in its neck-and-neck race against TikTok, Facebook has wholly revamped its main feed into what Mark Zuckerberg has described as a “discovery engine.” With the redesign, the site aims to boost content—mostly videos—that it thinks users would be most interested in into their direct line of sight.
Essentially, Facebook is departing from traditional social networking into entertainment discovery, à la TikTok. The platform asserts that the new feed will “make it easier for you to control what content you see and discover on Facebook,” and it does this by pushing a main TikTok-like feed to the forefront.
Meanwhile, recent posts by friends and family will be stashed in a separate page.
The home screen is now split into two main tabs. The default tab, ‘Home’, shows Facebook Reels, Instagram Reels, and Facebook Stories tailored to the user’s preferences, as suggested by the algorithm.
The other important tab, ‘Feeds’, retains the idea of Facebook that most would be familiar with, and it shows posts from friends, pages, and groups, in chronological order. Users will also be able to create a ‘Favorites’ list to view content from contacts and channels they care most about.
Both tabs, however, will feature advertisements.
The prioritizing of TikTok-like videos repositions Facebook as more of a channel for entertainment and shopping. According to Axios, the change in focus also makes Facebook “less vulnerable to privacy regulation.”
Notably, the revamp follows Facebook’s renaming of its New Feed to simply ‘Feed’, seemingly distancing itself from misinformation, back in February.
The overhauled Facebook feed began rolling out on mobile apps on Thursday, with a global transition across smartphones and other mobile devices expected over the coming week. The desktop and browser versions are poised to arrive later this year.
One of the most requested features for Facebook is to make sure people don't miss friends' posts. So today we're launching a Feeds tab where you can see posts from your friends, groups, Pages and more separately in chronological order. The app will still open to a personalized feed on the Home tab, where our discovery engine will recommend the content we think you'll care most about. But the Feeds tab will give you a way to customize and control your experience further.
Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday, July 21, 2022
Video via Mark Zuckerberg
