Mehta has argued for years that “young people” are essential to Facebook’s future. The company is currently making a number of changes to the 20-year-old social network in a bid to encourage younger users to spend more time on the app.
Updates include a new “Local” section in the Facebook app aimed at showing information relevant to local communities, a new focus on events planned for the service, and a new “Communities” feature in Messenger. It will be. Mehta claims the changes will help young people “explore their interests and connect with the world beyond their closest friends.”
The focus on events isn’t an entirely new strategy for the company. The company launched a standalone events app in 2016 and rebranded a year later to focus on “local” businesses and happenings. The app was quietly discontinued in 2021.
This time, Meta is taking a slightly different approach. A new Local section shows Marketplace listings, Reels, and Facebook Group posts, along with a list of community events. Local news, which Mehta has previously promoted, is notably absent from Mehta’s announcements.
In addition to the local tab, the company is also trying to make events more visible on Facebook. Facebook will now provide personalized event recommendations in the form of weekly and weekend digests, pushed to users through in-app notifications. The company is also changing the way invitations to Facebook events work, allowing users to send invitations to their connections via Instagram, SMS or email.
Facebook Groups, one of the most used features by young people, is also gaining attention with the update, Mehta said. Meta is experimenting with “customizable group AI” that allows admins to create bots that can chat with members and answer questions based on posts shared within the group. Elsewhere in the app, Meta has begun testing an Instagram-like Explore section and a dedicated space for Reels within Facebook.
Meta is adding a new “community” feature to Messenger, a concept it previously introduced in WhatsApp. Communities allow “small to medium-sized” groups to organize conversations and interact in a way similar to Facebook groups. Members can create topic-based chats, with built-in moderation and management tools to control who can participate.
The changes are part of Meta’s broader effort to lure younger people back to the app with features tailored to the way they use social media. “Facebook is still for everyone, but we’ve made significant changes with young people in mind as we build for the next generation of social media consumers,” Facebook app chief Tom Allison said in May. Ta.
However, it’s unclear whether Meta’s latest efforts will be successful. More than 40 million young people use Facebook in the U.S. and Canada, the company said, “the highest number in more than three years.” However, this is still a relatively small percentage of total users in the region, and an even smaller percentage of total users.
