Key takeaways:
- Facebook is seeking to revive its usage among the youth by focusing on AI and the creator economy.
- Meta AI, its AI assistant, will be embedded in its core offerings to help young adult users transition into adult life, such as looking for a job or apartment or going to college.
- It recently changed the way it paid creators – moving away from ad-revenue share to paying them based on views and engagement levels.
Facebook, the granddaddy of social media sites, is seeking to reclaim its top-dog status among young users by focusing on AI and the creator economy.
Parent company Meta announced that it is enhancing Facebook’s core offerings with AI to better meet the needs of young adults, whether they are going to college, getting their first job or apartment, among other needs.
With Meta AI, its AI assistant, users can dive deeper into Facebook finds. For example, users that come across a recipe for strawberry cheesecake can ask Meta AI to create a dairy-free version, according to a company blog post. Meta AI sits atop the company’s flagship large language model, Llama.
Meta also created a new model architecture that can learn from large datasets “very efficiently” to drive “significant” improvements in Facebook Reels, its short-form video product that competes with TikTok, and Feed, its classic stream for users’ posts.
Facebook is now rolling out globally an improved video player that offers full screen viewing, with a slider for skipping. (It was first unveiled in April.) After seeing an 80% increase in private video sharing year-over-year, Facebook said it is making sharing easier with friends and family on the platform and other apps such as WhatsApp.
Additionally, Facebook has simplified the path to earning revenue as a creator on its platform. Creators recently began earning based on the number of views and level of engagement of their content. Previously, they shared ad revenue with Facebook.
The company pursued this path after seeing growth in its creator economy: Facebook’s Professional Mode, designed for public posting and follower growth among creators, has amassed over 100 million daily active users in just 18 months.
Will Facebook reign among young users again?
The transition comes as Facebook said it counts more than 40 million daily active young adult users in the U.S. and Canada alone – the highest figure in three years. It is an encouraging statistic given that YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram continue to lead in teen usage, according to a survey by Pew Research Center released last December.
“Teens were less likely to be using Facebook and Twitter (recently renamed X) than they were a decade ago,” the research center said. “Facebook once dominated the social media landscape among America’s youth, but the share of teens who use the site has dropped from 71% in 2014-2015 to 33% today.”
As of the fourth quarter of 2023, Facebook reported 3.07 billion monthly active users, up 3% year-over-year.
