According to a recently leaked internal Facebook memo, TikTok’s growth has caused concern for the social media platform company. The Verge, a technology news website in the United States, recently published an article based on information obtained from an inside Facebook communication.
In a letter, Facebook’s head of apps, Tom Alison, explained the company’s plans to overhaul its feed, as well as other significant changes to the Facebook app. According to the document, Facebook’s approach to countering TikTok is no longer restricted to pushing the short-video app Reels.
In its feed, Facebook is expected to “balance connected and unconnected content” meaning that it may start recommending more content from sites it isn’t connected to in users’ feeds. Users will continue to view posts from their friends and family, but they will see more content from entities with which they are not involved.
Even though Messenger and Facebook are now separate apps, the paper recommends integrating the two to enable “message-based content sharing,” as Ellison describes it.
Facebook continues to prioritize Reels, with plans to “integrate Reels into Home, Watch, IFR, and Groups.”
Reels is a Facebook product that competes with TikTok in the short-video market. Instagram, Facebook’s photo-sharing social network, owns it. These new capabilities should be recognizable to TikTok users. Even though the letter did not expressly mention TikTok, it is evident that Facebook intends to compete with TikTok in the short-video space.
After all, the goal of Facebook’s rebranding of Messenger and Facebook appears to be to make it more like TikTok’s “FYP” (For You Page) tags, which highlight featured videos that TikTok believes viewers will enjoy. The Inbox feature on TikTok is similar to the integrated Facebook app.
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