Meta’s adding a couple of new ways to provide input on the Reels that are displayed in your Feed. At the same time, Meta’s also looking to showcase Reels – its fastest-growing content format – in more areas. Then again, ever since it was conceptualized, Meta has been hard-pushing Reels, which is understandable since it’s going against TikTok.

Reviews Please

First up, Meta’s adding new, simplified feedback control options on Reels clips, so that you can register what you want to see more or less of in your Feed. Based on official examples, there will now be a new ‘Show More’ and ‘Show Less’ options at the top of the three dots menu on any Reels clip.

Meta will also prompt users for direct feedback at the bottom of the screen to better align their algorithmic recommendations with their interests. As Meta explains:

“Selecting Show More on a Reel will temporarily increase its ranking score and for Reels like it. Selecting Show Less will temporarily decrease its ranking score. By capturing your direct feedback, we’re able to make reels ranking smarter and more attuned to your preferences.”

The same mechanism has been employed by the likes of TikTok and other short-form focused formats, providing a better feedback loop, which is especially important as the algorithm increasingly becomes less reliant on user social graphs. True enough, Meta recently reported that more than 20% of the content now displayed within people’s Facebook Feeds has been recommended by AI, based on their activity, while on Instagram. That number has since risen to 40%.

Traditionally, Meta has relied on the people and Pages that users are connected to so that it can dictate the content displayed. However, as it moves away from the model, it has fewer direct feedback points to rely on for this purpose. This makes these quick response options more important in guiding the algorithm toward user interests.

Meta says that it’s also adding contextual labels on the Reels player to explain why users are seeing certain Reels – ‘for example, because a friend of yours liked it’. On another front, Meta’s also looking to better highlight Reels clips in the Watch Feed, with a new Reels shelf to be added atop of Facebook Watch.

The Wrap

Again, this makes sense, given how Reels is currently the app’s fastest-growing content surface, while Meta says that Reels consumption has been a key driver of increasing user time spent in the app. In exchange for higher Reels activity, users are not really posting as many updates as they once did, but that’s not bad for Meta, at least right now. More eyeballs are better, but content reduction can also have impacts over time, especially if Facebook loses its place as the key sharing destination for daily and friends updates.

Sources

https://bit.ly/3B0oWzw