ICYMI: Facebook Focuses on Gen Z Through Creators + Community
New Local Tab pulls from Reels, Marketplace, Groups + Events
Facebook hosted a pop-up in Austin on Friday, Facebook IRL, to introduce new features aimed at Gen Z.
Creators and locals were invited to the experience that had a distinctive Texas vibe, featuring a cowboy hat bar, succulent clay pot painting sessions and endless selfie stations.
Head of Facebook Tom Alison told the crowd this year’s strategy is driven by generational change — shifting the spotlight to Gen Z — and AI innovation.
You might remember Facebook’s announcement that more than 40M young adults use the platform daily across the US and Canada — the highest number it's been in more than 3 years. And the company is shooting its shot.
UPDATES ANNOUNCED
The new features announced at Facebook IRL were focused on where Gen Z spends time in Facebook Marketplace, Groups, Events and Video:
🌵 A New Local Tab: The new Local tab pulls together the best local content from across Reels, Marketplace, Groups, and Events, so people can find nearby activities, groups, and recommendations all in one place.
Alison says Local is currently testing in Austin, New York, LA, DC, Chicago, and 5 other cities.
🌵 A New Explore Tab: The new Explore tab allows people to deep dive into their interests. But the recommendation algorithm is less focused on finding entertaining content and more focused on practical content that might be useful to you, like life hacks, time management tips, travel tips, DIY furniture repurposing, vegan cooking tips from Groups and more.
The Explore test should be available in the US on Friday.
🌵 Events Update: Facebook launched a new feature that allows event creators to invite their Instagram followers to Facebook events. You can also send SMS and email invites to guests, which means everyone can RSVP to a Facebook event whether they are on Facebook or not. Plus, Facebook introduced a weekly events digest feature to make it easier to discover local events.
Takeaways
The focus seems to be on discovery, utility, community and IRL events, especially as they appeal to Gen Z.
Creators and brands that are focused on info-tainment, advice-based content, community pages, events and local experiences stand to benefit, with this new emphasis putting Facebook somewhere at the intersection of NextDoor meets Meetup meets Yelp meets Craigslist meets how-to guides meets your contacts list.
What if you’re covering content about multiple regions as a travel creator or restaurant review site, for example?
Content relevant to a particular city is what’s shown in the feed, versus having to be geographically located in that city. A travel creator might share content for a variety of cities they visit so where they actually live is less important than the relevant local content they produce about a city.
GEN Z FOCUS
I caught up with Alison after his keynote and asked why it seems like this year marks such a distinction between millennials and the next generation driving the product roadmap.
“I think the reason we're talking about it so much this year is we've just made a lot of product investments over the last year or two that are really starting to hit the mark with young adults, like marketplace, like groups and bringing more creators onto Facebook,” he explained.
“We are really all about being around for the next 20 years, and in order to do that, we wanted to make sure that we are building for this next generation. So that became really our number one focus.”
CREATOR FOCUS
Another theme is one we’ve seen play out this year with the first ever White House Creator Economy conference and creators tracks at SXSW and Cannes Lions, acknowledging the impact creators have as a channel to reach Gen Z:
“Young adults feel very much that creators are relatable messengers of the things they want to hear. And so a lot of the reasons why I talk so much about how we're investing in creators is, we know that that's where we need to be,” said Alison, adding, “Video and short form video and creators, that's the new way people want to express themselves. That's the way people want to explore content.”
The company says it plans to invest in three areas to improve the Creator experience on Facebook:
Improving how they communicate policy violations, providing details of the status of an account in the professional dashboard
Offering creators pathways to resolve issues when mistakes occur by going through an in-app education experience
Helping creators protect their brand and business through tools like advanced protection and two-factor authentication. “We are also giving fans the ability to report a creator account that they think has been hacked so we can help more quickly restore rightful ownership,” said Alison.
EXTRAS
Other interesting data Facebook shared at the event:
Private sharing (or messaging) on Facebook has grown more than 100% year on year
There are 25M active public Groups on Facebook
More than 1.8B users engage in Groups every month
Young adults say Facebook is their preferred destination to connect with communities over shared interests (aka Groups)
Young adults spend 60% of their time on Facebook on videos, and more than half watch reels every day
Super interesting, thanks for the detailed recap Lia!