Meta says Facebook’s future (still) lies in young adults

When we think of the 20-year-old social network Facebook, it’s its popularity among “young adults” that comes to mind. Naturally, Meta wants to change that and the company is once again telling the world that it intends to reorient its platform in order to appeal to this demographic.

In From Tom Alison, who runs the Facebook app for Meta, he says the service is evolving to reflect an “increased focus on young adults” compared to other users. “Facebook is still for everyone, but in order to build for the next generation of social media consumers, we’ve made significant changes with young adults in mind,” he wrote.

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because Meta executives have been trying to win over “young adults” for years in an effort to better compete with TikTok. Mark Zuckerberg said almost a long time ago that he wanted to make young adults the “north star” of the company. And Alison and Zuckerberg both talked about pivoting the Facebook app to a feed rather than one based on user connections.

This change is now well underway. Alison said the company’s advancements in AI have already improved recommendations for Reels and Streams, and that “advanced recommendations technology will power more products” over the next year. He added that private sharing between users is also on the rise, with more users sharing videos (but no word on plans to bring messaging back into the main app).

Notably, Alison’s memo makes no mention of the “metaverse,” which Zuckerberg also once considered a central part of the company’s future. Instead, he says “building on new product capabilities enabled by AI” is an important goal, as is attracting younger users. It’s also not surprising, given that Meta and Zuckerberg have recently dabbled in some of the company’s metaverse ambitions as AI advancements.

But it’s also unclear how successful Meta will be in his efforts to win over young adults. Although Alison says Facebook has seen “five quarters of healthy growth in app usage by young adults in the U.S. and Canada,” with 40 million young adult daily active users, that’s still a a relatively small percentage of Facebook’s 205 million daily users in the United States, according to the company. in February, the last time it disclosed the app’s user numbers.