Get ready to see more strangers on your Facebook and Instagram feeds.
Both social media platforms plan to deliver more content from people you don’t follow to keep you interested. Parent company Meta revealed the strategy during an earnings call(Opens in a new window) Wednesday.
“Right now, about 15% of the content on someone’s Facebook feed and slightly more than their Instagram feed is recommended by our AI from people, groups or accounts you don’t follow. We expect those numbers to more than double by the end of next year,” said company CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg is betting his AI algorithms will be able to find engaging content to keep you hooked on the platforms, which should help generate more ad revenue for the company. “As our AI finds additional content that people find interesting, it increases engagement and the quality of our streams,” he said as Meta first reported lower revenue growth. one year to the next.
Still, the strategy represents a shift from Facebook’s focus on promoting content from friends and family, which the platform pivoted to in 2016. Three years later, Facebook also began giving the priority to groups. The goal was to build a sense of community on Facebook and help you find the content you care about when the company struggled with concerns about misinformation and fake news.
But now the company says its AI algorithms will increasingly drive content on Facebook and Instagram. Algorithms are already hard at work on Reels, a competitor similar to Meta’s TikTok, which features a continuous stream of videos it thinks you’ll like. “But this overall AI trend is much broader and covers all types of content, including text, images, links, group content, etc.,” Zuckerberg said. “Creating a recommender system for all of these types of content is something that we’re uniquely focused on.”
Not everyone likes change. But Zuckerberg says that popping up content from people you don’t follow can actually lead you to share the same content with friends and family.
Recommended by our editors
“One social trend we’re seeing is that instead of people just interacting in the comments on their feeds, most people find interesting content in their feeds and then they forward that content to friends and interact there” , did he declare. “It creates that flywheel of discovery, and then social connection, and inspires those people to create more content themselves.”
However, if you only want to see posts from people you follow on Facebook and Instagram, the company recently introduced new features that can do just that. In March, Instagram rolled out two new content feeds, called Favorites and Following, which will also display posts in chronological order. They can be accessed by tapping on the Instagram logo in the top left corner of the homepage.
This month, Facebook added a new “Feeds” tab in the app, which will only show content from users or groups you follow in chronological order. You can access it by going to the menu bar, which appears as three lines in the top right corner of the Facebook app.
Receive our best stories!
Register for What’s up now to get our top stories delivered to your inbox every morning.
This newsletter may contain advertisements, offers or affiliate links. Signing up for a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. You can unsubscribe from newsletters at any time.