Facebook continues to move away from news content, in preference for entertaining video (ala TikTok), with the announcement that it’ll also be retiring its Instant Articles offering in April next year. Originally launched back in 2015, Instant Articles were designed to provide publishers with a more engaging, fast-loading way to present their articles on Facebook, helping to maximize reader engagement in the app.
Another One Bites It
Since the inception of Instant Articles, Meta sought to add more referral links and subscription tools as part of its ongoing effort to better integrate itself with publishers and help them use Facebook as a complementary platform for their main sites. Now, the same has seemingly become a lesser priority.
As reported by Axios, Meta’s calling it quits with its support for Instant Articles as it works to better align with user preferences, which increasingly sees video become its most engaging content format. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently noted that video makes up 50% of all the time spent on Facebook, while Reels are tearing it up across both Facebook and Instagram. Zuckerberg also noted that Facebook users ‘don’t want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our services’.
As such, Meta’s working to inject more entertaining videos into user Feeds, which are being displayed based on AI-based recommendations and not on the social graph. Zuckerberg sees this as the future of Facebook, which, like it or not, does make sense. TikTok has essentially changed the perspectives on what Social Media can and maybe should be in its next stage, with a bigger focus on entertainment taking the reins.
Social platforms have a nigh-infinite supply of entertaining content, posted by users from all around the world, and while Facebook was founded on the concept of connecting with immediate family and friends, that also made it restrictive, in that you might be missing out on big updates posted by people you’ll never be connected in the app with.
Zuckerberg did concede to the fact that he had overlooked the potential of behavioral development. Here’s the bottom line – Meta is now moving away from what had been its core offer, which are posts from family and friends, along with news updates, and more towards providing more entertaining videos.
The Wrap
Really, this recent change all came from TikTok. The last two years saw TikTok’s usage skyrocket, while it caused Meta’s to decline, which has now led to the latter’s decision to re-align its tools so that it can tap into these newer trends – because Social Media is now more about entertainment than it is about connection, which is honestly pretty ironic; news content just isn’t the gem that it once was. What publishers and marketers should take from this is that, like Meta, they too should consider focusing on short-form video, meaning that if they want to maximize engagement, then they need to be publishing video content too.
Subscribe to our ‘Bottoms Up!’ Newsletter. Get the latest social media blogs about news, updates, trends, and effective social media strategies to take your business to the highest level from Tristan Ahumada and Jeff Pfitzer.
Sources