Meta’s, head of Facebook, Tom Alison (pictured) was clearly spoiling for a fight with TikTok, as he told a live-streamed roundtable of journalists from APAC that the video-sharing app, rather than driving social forward was chasing more established players.
“If you look at what TikTok is investing in today, at least what I see, I actually feel like they’re chasing Facebook and they’re chasing Instagram,” he said.
“You know, when I open TikTok, they’re asking me to find my friends, I find my friends asking me to share stories, they’re asking me to engage with more social features, to re-share something or message something. These are all features that we either pioneered or really evolved on Facebook and Instagram.”
Alison explained that, in his view, being able to share content — video or otherwise — with a Facebook Group or with existing friends and family on Facebook was far more interesting than simply consuming content.
“The reason they’re doing this [asking users to share content] is because really what people want is, they don’t just want to view videos,” he continued.
“Certainly that’s a big part of what they do, [but] the experience is much more interesting when you’re finding something that you’re interested in and sharing it with your friends… Sometimes the conversation is more interesting than the content itself.”
Facebook parent company Meta has coined this type of content sharing “social discovery.”
“Being able to take a Reel, and share it with a group of people, like a Facebook Group, where people have the same interest and see all of the jokes, or the conversation, or whatever comes out of that. That’s really magical and I think its the future.”
However, there are questions about just how many people of Facebook’s now two billion daily active users are coming to the platform to explore content from creators in the same way that they do with TikTok or YouTube, for instance.
“When a creator is thinking about where to produce their content, we want them to produce it on Instagram and we also make it really easy for that same creator to cross-post it to Facebook. We believe that creators are better when they’re leveraging the power of our multiple apps,” he said.
“If you’re a creator, you should be creating with Meta. We’re going to help you get your content to the right audience on Instagram and we’re going to help you get that content to a great audience on Facebook. That’s going to grow your reach and it’s going to grow your ability to connect with your fans and your followers,” he continued.
“What is Facebook going to do differently? Facebook isn’t just about video. But some creators aren’t going to want to just produce video. Some creators are going to want to produce text, or they’re going to want to produce photos… We want Facebook to have the broadest range of expression possible and give you access to the broadest audience possible. I think that’s a phenomenal differentiator for Facebook compared to any other app out there.”
However, while Alison was quick to trash TikTok and talk up Facebook’s content variety and pedigree in social, “Facebook has been doing this for almost 20 years,” he also acknowledged that TikTok’s video focus and algorithmic content recommendations both have merit.
“TikTok has certainly shown the power of a great format, which is short-form video and the tools around it and making it easy for people create, with the power of a great algorithm to help people discover it,” he said.
“Now, pretty much anybody in social media needs to have a good video offering and I think they need to have a good set of recommendations to bring people short-form video.”
To that end, Alison explained that Facebook — rather than clinging on to social discovery — was focusing heavily on AI tools to help deliver content recommendations.
“We’re using AI for recommendations. How do you find the perfect piece of content for you that was generated across billions of people and billions of pieces of content,” he explained.
“That’s a huge technical AI challenge that you can see in our product today. We’re getting better and better as a result of our investments.”
However, Facebook is also planning to use generative AI to help people create more content.
“What’s really interesting about generative AI, is that if you see some of the ways that it’s being used today, like ChatGPT, you see it almost as an alternative to search, as an interesting way to do information retrieval,” he said.
“What you’re going to see from us in terms of generative AI, is thinking how do we give people creative superpowers? How do we take a photo and maybe enhance it? Again, not just a filter, but maybe we could say ‘Take a photo of my daughter and put her in a cool Halloween costume’ and have generative AI make these kinds of creations that can enhance the photos and my own creativity. Those are the types of things that our team is starting to look at.”
Alison said that he was “excited” about generative AI and the ways that it can help people create on Meta’s platforms, “you’re not just going to see this in Facebook or Instagram, you’re going to see this across Meta.”
From listening to Alison, it’s clear that Facebook is on a mission to reposition itself as the platform approaches two decades in operation and faces increased challenges. Watch this space.
