Additionally, the business is introducing a new Communities feature for Messenger later this year.
In the last few years, Meta has engaged in a lot of debate and has emphasized how important young adults are for the growth of the Facebook Social Networking site. At the moment the company is taking a few steps forward in altering the architecture of a twenty-year-old social app with the aim of attracting the attention of younger generation to the application.
Some of the features that have been added include a new ‘Facebook–local’ section of the App which provides local content, a renewed Service Events focus that allows for events planned on the platform and a new ‘Communities’ option in the Messenger App. In the opinion of Meta, these changes shall assist young adults in ‘looking for their new interests, while also making a step back to the world where their best friends do not reside in.
For some time now, even this Innovation perspective Incorporating Events has been applied. First the business released stand-alone events application in 2016, and a year later, it refocused the app overhaules on ‘regional’ apps. In the year 2021, this app was very quietly projected out of existence.
Nonetheless, in this situation, Meta tends to vary slightly from the norm. This new’ local’ feature will also have listings for community activities as well as advertisement listings, Reels, and Facebook group activities. For reasons unknown however within the announcement made by Meta, the hyperlocal news is not mentioned which is one of the products that has been sold by Meta at a point of time.
In addition, the Company is also improving how events can be discovered on Facebook in enhancement to the local tab. In a bid to help engage users in the event planning process, Facebook will now allow users to get tailored event suggestions in terms of weekly and weekend event suggestion lists. This will be done using in-app notifications which are sent to the users. Moreover, the company is changing the mechanics of how Facebook event RSVP requests are sent, allowing users to invite people via their Instagram accounts, as well as through email and text message.
The Facebook Groups tool, concerning which Meta has claimed that is one of the most popular features among the youth, has also been included in this update. There is a new bot called “a customizable Group AI” that Meta is currently working on introducing. This application allows the manager to create a bot that will converse with group members and answer their questions by drawing on content made available in the group. Meta is also experimenting with a ‘reels’ section in Facebook… in addition to a section that is akin to Instagram’s Explore feature.
In the Messenger application, Meta is adding a new feature referred to as “Communities,” which is a feature that was first introduced by WhatsApp. Small to medium size groups can structure their discussion, and interact with each other in a way that is akin to how community related Facebook groups operate.
These changes are in keeping with the ongoing efforts by Meta to bring back active users of its app, particularly the young generation, through the provision of features that match their behavior of using social networks. According to Tom Alison, head of the Facebook app, in May, “Facebook remains for all, but we are building for the future consumers of social media technology, and we made drastic improvements aimed at a young adult audience”. “Young people in turn are the audience we want to reach which is why these changes have been made.
Yet, it remains to be established with certainty whether the last efforts undertaken by Meta might prove successful or not. Facebook has stated that more than 40 million of its present users in the United States and Canada are young adults. And this is, “the highest it has ever gotten in over three years,” the company claimed. However, this comprises only a small third of the total users within that region and an even thinner slice of the global user base.