Meta"s Facebook head Tom Alison penned a blog post to tell everyone that for the next 20 years, Facebook is focused on young adults and expanding its AI capabilities. While anyone can use Facebook, the 20-year-old social networking giant is working to optimize the platform for users aged 18 to 29.
This includes expanding its AI capabilities, making videos easier to explore, and monetary opportunities for creators on the platform. Alison wrote that the user engagement from young adults on the platform is at the highest in three years with over 40 million US/Canadian young adults among daily active users.
Around one in four young adult daily active users in the US and Canada use the Facebook Marketplace. Facebook Dating has seen a steady growth of more than 20% in daily active users year-over-year and more than 1.8 billion users engage in Facebook groups every month.
Young Adults are making big transitions – moving, going to college, getting their first job or apartment. And Facebook can help with all of this, whether it’s finding great deals on furniture on Marketplace, exploring their interests with Reels and in Groups, connecting with their local communities and small businesses, or finding someone they like on Facebook Dating.
Meta saw "significant improvements" when testing its new AI model that "can learn from large datasets easily" and recommend content in Facebook Reels. Its recently updated video player has more relevant video recommendations regardless of the length, with a special focus on the growing Reels format.
The new video player makes all videos vertical but comes with a full-screen mode for Reels, long-form videos, and live content to watch horizontal videos in landscape view. The player also has a slider to skip around in longer videos and includes options to quickly send videos to people. Alison notes that private sharing has been growing at a rate of 80% year-over-year.
Facebook (now Meta) itself was founded by a group of young adults at Harvard about two decades ago. Now, it appears that the company is looking down to its roots as early features like poking friends are making a return.