Have you been using Facebook and Instagram less as of late? Sad to say, but it seems that these once trendsetting platforms have lost much of their luster, in large part due to Instagram’s insistence on pumping more content from accounts that you don’t follow. The ‘inspiration’ for this approach is obviously TikTok, which has seen great success by focusing on content, as opposed to creators. Long story short, Instagram saw an opportunity to try and play off of TikTok’s algorithmically-defined systems and bombard its users with recommendations based on their viewing habits, which just ended up annoying most of its users.
The New Cool
And many users would agree – according to a recent report from The Wall Street Journal, Instagram engagement is in decline, with Reels, in particular, seeing a significant drop-off in user engagement of late. However, in the same report, The WSJ says that TikTok users spend over 10x as many hours consuming content as Instagram users view Reels. A leaked internal report also states that Reels engagement has dropped by 13.6% in recent months, with most Reels having ‘no user engagement whatsoever’.
Meta lightly refuted the claims, saying that usage data alone cannot paint the whole picture. Although it also declined to add more context, which is usually what Meta does when it can’t dispel such claims with its own insight. As an example, back in 2016, Meta noted that people were spending more than 50 minutes per day using Facebook as part of its regular performance report. It hasn’t reported any official stats on this ever since.
Meta has since shifted to talk about daily and monthly active users, where it has relatively solid figures. Of course, this is nothing more than a deflection move – Facebook and Instagram have traditionally been based on building on your social graph and establishing a digital connection with the people that you know and want to stay connected with. This has made these two daily go-to’s just to see what family and friends are up to, which is also another reason Meta is trying to push more interesting content into your main feed. However, whatever strategy Meta is currently employing doesn’t seem to be working.
It’s one thing to be showered by posts from people and pages you actually follow and like, but it’s a different thing altogether to be disoriented by a mountain of content from recommendation-based accounts and profiles that you don’t even know. Not only does it clutter your Feed, but also makes it harder to see posts from those you’d actually like to see. It’s not hard to understand why a lot of people would be frustrated by this – because Meta is fundamentally now going against its own ethos, purely for its own gain.
Accept it or not, people go to different apps for different reasons, which in this case is entertainment if we’re talking about TikTok. People go to either Facebook or Instagram to see updates about people they care about. The focus is not the same, but Facebook has been adamant to counter its engagement declines and keep its status as ‘the cool place to be’. While Meta does need to try and seek ways to negate user losses, funnel-feeding its users with AI-based recommendations isn’t a solution.
The Wrap
The entire Social Media landscape has drastically changed since TikTok’s rise to stardom, meaning that there’s no simple solution to counter engagement decline. It all boils down to major shifts in user behaviors and how people want to use platforms. There was a time when Social Media’s greatest appeal was that it gave everyone their own soapbox and a means to publicly share their thoughts and opinions.
Sharing too much can also lead to problems, especially since whatever is shared will forever be saved in the internet’s perfect memory. Political alignment, religious beliefs, and socio-political stances can all drastically change the course of debates. This partially explains why entertainment has now become the focus of the next generation – it’s less about the personal and more about engaging in cultural trends.
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