Facebook's latest redesign doubles down on recommended content with chronological feed

Meta

Meta on July 21 announced a major revamp of its Facebook app on Android and iOS, changing how users view their feed at a time when the tech giant aims to attract new younger audiences onto its platform.

The social networking platform is splitting its feed into two different feeds - a Home tab and a new Feeds tab.

Home tab will surface personalised content recommendations including Reels, Stories and other content from creators and friends through the company's discovery engine which it thinks users "care most about".

A new Feeds tab will show all content posted by the user's friends, groups, and pages they follow in a chronological order.

Alternatively, users can also view posts only from their friends, groups, pages or favorites, which are essentially posts from friends and pages that a user manually selects to prioritise on their feed.

Both the Home and Feeds tabs will be accessible through the shortcut bar on the top of the Facebook app.

This move is somewhat similar to the recent revamp by Meta-owned video and photo sharing platform Instagram as it brought back the chronological feed to its app in March this year.

"One of the most requested features for Facebook is to make sure people don't miss friends' posts. So today we're launching a Feeds tab where you can see posts from your friends, groups, Pages and more separately in chronological order" Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on Facebook announcing the feed changes.

Similar to Instagram, the catch however is that the app will still open to an algorithmic feed with recommended content and it doesn't seem like users will be able to choose the chronological-based feed as the default feed.

This revamp comes at a time when Meta is exploring various measures to drive up usage of its family of apps after witnessing its first-ever quarterly decline of daily users earlier this year.

A key measure is the increased push for short videos with Reels becoming the centrepiece of Facebook's product strategy, amid increased video consumption on the platform.

Mark Zuckerberg had said earlier this year that Reels is their "fastest-growing content format by far". It is also the biggest contributor to engagement growth on Instagram.

In February this year, Meta said it will be making Reels available across more parts of the Facebook app, including groups, top of the home feed and its long-form video destination Facebook Watch apart from extending it to more than 150 countries.