Currently the leading platform offered by Meta, Facebook is planning a daring effort aimed at regaining young adults age group to return back to the platform by gradually introducing new features that will help this social network get rid of a tag of social network for elderly people.
The Great Refresh Facebook's Quest to Capture Gen Next
This new change in new strategy has come at a right time as Facebook has faced rut from new upcoming social platforms like TIKTOK, INSTAGRAM through their dynamic video contents and community outreach platforms among the youthful community.
Tom Alison, Facebook’s head at Meta, admits that at the beginning, the purpose was to connect families and friends, but now younger people have professional networking and new contacts – a trend that the company is happy to follow.
New features that complete the platform transformation increase the focus on community aspects relevant to young people during life changes like relocation or starting a family; Marketplace and special interest groups.
To get back on track and address the new type of competition characterized by short-form content, Facebook is trying to bet on videos and gamified formats because it acknowledges that youth primarily engages with video content.
This attempt to rejuvenate is a crucial inflexion point for Facebook as it tries to continue to preserve its current audience, while at the same time redesigning it so that it is more attractive to the new generation of social media users.
Facebook's Next Chapter Local Connections and Life Transitions
The social network head of Meta, Facebook’s parent company has transition into focus to provide companion during young adult individual’s life transitions with new feature launches mainly aimed at helping them during major life changes. Tom Alison, Facebook’s head, pointed out how effective it is in reaching users during such transition; and that includes moving to new cities, becoming parents, among others.
The addition of two new tabs, namely Local and Explore, makes it the latest try of Facebook to aggressively build a community phase. Still under development, the features are being piloted in some markets to improve the jungles’ experience of users in search of local partners and content.
It all compels the Local tab and becomes the single focus of the localized one with features for nearby events, active community groups, and even Marketplace listings. This integration serves the more functional purpose of helping people when they need to move to a new area, or when they go through significant life changes, like moving from college into an apartment.
At the same time, the Explore tab is more focused and suggests materials based on the users’ selected preferences. This feature is what Facebook is trying to do as it challenges discovery-centric apps, although it remains loyal to its core mission of connecting people, even if for a brief moment.
All these updates are indicative of the strategic shift of Facebook yielding to the need of mature adults served by it, need for addressing the young adults in transition phase and the need to promote causes of well established local aging bonds. The goal is to shift the perception of the platform from a simple social network into something more utilitarian – a way to handle major life transitions.
Facebook's Youth Strategy Breaking Free from Its Parent-Platform Image
In an A-grade strategy to regain the attention of the younger generation after losing them to competitors like Tik Tok which has 150m active users in the US alone, Facebook is eager to transform. Facebook Inc’s approach is eminently notable and entails Reels, a TikTok short-video format equivalent launched in 2021 as part of Meta’s niche targeting youths.
The changes being brought about on this platform seem to be picking up momentum, as young adults use the platform to consuming video content by 60%. This will be another consolidated video option coming soon that will make the interface of Facebook even easier to use and will include multiple crops of short videos and live streams as well as full-length videos.
Dating features have become one of the most positive highlights in Facebook’s youth targeting approach. An added dating service was launched in 2019; conversations among young adults in the U.S. and Canada initiating by the platform escalated by 24%YoY indicating a shift of the platform to encourage modern relationship formation.
About the purpose to free F from an image of a social networking site of the elderly generation, it was clearly stated in a color brochure at the Austin event – ‘Not your mom’s (Facebook)’.
This can be considered as the most focused attempt ever to update the identity and populate the site, making it an important turning point in the transition from a family-oriented social site to a rapidly developing and explicitly attracting youth-oriented site with intense activity and continuous developing of new features and approaches to content presenting.
