The social media landscape is changing; platforms like YouTube and TikTok have pushed other platforms to steer towards video content. A good example of this is Instagram’s turn towards video content last year. People are looking to videos more nowadays for their entertainment and information than written media.
So, Facebook is focusing on video content
TikTik’s rise to dominance is, ostensibly, what prompted Facebook to pivot to be more of a video platform. The social media site does host videos, but it’s not often your first choice when it comes to video sites. You mostly go to check up on what your friends are doing. According to The Wall Street Journal (via The Verge) Facebook executive Campbell Brown released a memo to the company. It basically said that the company is going to be putting more time and effort into promoting video creation on the site. This move, as per the memo is to “heighten their focus on building a more robust Creator economy.” Right now, it’s unclear as to what this means. We don’t know what changes will come to the platform that will help it compete with YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. However, one thing is for sure, written media will suffer. The memo states that the engineering and production teams will be putting more of a focus on video content and less on written content. Right now, Facebook has two products that support written content. News and Bulletin. News is a way for big-name publications to curate their content for Facebook users. Bulletin is the company’s newsletter platform. This move will shift time, energy, and resources away from News and Bulletin and push them to video content creation. This seems like a major blow to people who have built a platform on Facebook. Right now, it’s hard to tell how Facebook will cater to its content creators, and what it will do to bring on new creators. We can’t deny that this decision was fueled by the ongoing feud between Facebook and TikTik. The short-form video-sharing app has been skimming users from Meta’s Instagram for some time, and Facebook is NOT happy about that. Because of this, you might see a shift toward video content when you go on Facebook sometime in the future. Let’s just hope that you’ll still be able to share your written content on the platform.
