2024-10-04 18:17:42| Engadget
Meta has spent the last few years saying that young adults are crucial to the future of Facebook. Now, the company is introducing a number of changes to its 20-year-old social network in an effort to get younger users to spend more time in the app.
The updates include a new local section in the Facebook app that aims to surface information relevant to your local community, a renewed focus on events planned on the service and a new Communities feature for Messenger. The changes, Meta claims, will help young adults explore their interests and connect with the world beyond their close friends.
Emphasizing events isnt an entirely new strategy for the company. It launched a standalone events app in 2016 and then rebranded it a year later to focus on local businesses and happenings. It quietly killed the app in 2021.
Meta is taking a slightly different approach this time. The new local section will surface Marketplace listings, Reels and posts from Facebook groups alongside event listings from your community. Local news, which Meta has also previously boosted, is notably absent Metas announcement.
In addition to the local tab, the company is also trying to make events more prominent in Facebook. Facebook will now provide personalized event recommendations in the form of a weekly and weekend digest that will be pushed to users via in-app notifications. The company is also changing how invitations to Facebook events work so users can send invites to their connections on Instagram and via SMS and email.
Groups on Facebook, which Meta has said is among the most-used features by young adults, is also getting attention in this update. Meta is experimenting with a a customizable Group AI that allows admins to create a bot that can chat with members to answer questions based on posts that have been shared in the group. Elsewhere in the app, Meta is starting to test an Instagram-like Explore section and a dedicated space for Reels inside of Facebook.
On Messenger, Meta is adding a new Communities feature, a concept it previously introduced on WhatsApp. Communities allows small to medium-sized groups to organize their conversations and interact in a way thats more like a Facebook group. Members can create topic-based chats and there are built in moderation and admin tools for controlling who can join.
The changes are part of a broader effort by Meta to bring younger people back to its app with features tailored around how they use social media. Facebook is still for everyone, but in order to build for the next generation of social media consumers, weve made significant changes with young adults in mind, the Facebook apps head, Tom Alison, wrote in May.
Whether Metas latest efforts will be successful, though, is unclear. The company says there are more than 40 million young adults on Facebook in the US and Canada, a number thats the highest its been in more than 3 years. But thats still a relatively small percentage of its total users in the region and an even tinier slice of its users overall.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/facebook-is-pushing-local-content-and-events-to-try-to-win-back-young-adults-161742961.html?src=rss
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