The Future of Facebook

By Tom Alison, Head of Facebook

Our vision for Facebook is simple: Facebook is for social discovery that opens your world in big and small ways. We’ve always been social, and we’ve always helped people discover things, but the way that people want to do this is changing, so we’re evolving our product accordingly. As we think about the next 20 years, we’re focused on two big things: building the next generation of social media for young adults and leaning into new product capabilities enabled by AI.

An Increased Focus on Young Adults

Facebook is still for everyone, but in order to build for the next generation of social media consumers, we’ve made significant changes with young adults in mind. And with five quarters of healthy growth in young adult app usage in the US and Canada, over 40 million US/CA young adults are daily active users, and this number is the highest in three years.

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.

To make these connections even easier, we’ve made changes to our core product.

Expanding AI Capabilities

We upgraded our Reels and Feed ranking technologies to more effectively deliver recommendations. We invented a new model architecture – that can learn from large datasets very efficiently – and it drove significant improvements in our pilot with Facebook Reels. Over the next year or so, this advanced recommendations technology will power more products, including our entire video ecosystem, and our Feed recommendations.

By the end of 2026, our goal is to have the world’s best recommendation technology. 

In addition, we’re also building one of the world’s best collections of open models, tools and resources for generative AI with Meta Llama. Generative AI creates even more opportunities for social discovery on Facebook by helping you go deeper on the things you find. Say you come across a recipe for strawberry cheesecake on Facebook. With the click of a button, you can ask Meta AI how to make a dairy-free version and you’ll get an answer instantly.

Video Improvements

We made it easier to explore and connect over videos you’re interested in, regardless if they’re a Reel, longer video, or Live content. And we made improvements to the video experience on Facebook, including an updated fullscreen video player, and a slider to skip around in longer videos. This player is now rolling out globally. We’ve also seen an increase in private sharing – which is growing at over 80% year over year – so we added the ability to quickly send videos to the people you care about, whether on Facebook or through another platform like WhatsApp. 

Creator Opportunities

We also made it easier for anyone to become a creator and earn money on Facebook. We introduced a simplified product called Professional Mode designed for people who want to post publicly and grow a following, and it’s grown to over 100 million daily active users in 18 months. We’ve also evolved our payout model to pay creators based on how well their content performs on Facebook, simplifying how creators earn and expanding monetization opportunities to all formats – photos, videos and text. 

We’re building Facebook for what young adults want from social media – social discovery that opens your world in big and small ways. And we’re doing this with a huge community of people who are into what you’re into, unique features to help you take action on the things you find, and some of the best AI technology in the world.

 

An infographic explaining how people are using Facebook.



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