Facebook is working on rebuilding its image

Could Facebook be regaining popularity? Shunned by the younger generation since the advent of TikTok, favorability towards Facebook has reportedly recovered since the platform opted to reduce political content, according to a US report. The number of users has not increased significantly, but the social network’s strategy of de-emphasising news could have had a positive impact on the way it is perceived by users.

Now in its twentieth year – due to be celebrated in 2024 – Facebook is considered an older social network that can seem somewhat dated and unattractive to generations Z and Y, who tend to prefer TikTok, particularly since the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown. By the end of 2021, Facebook had even lost users for the first time in its history: the number of people logging on every day worldwide had fallen by 4 million in the last quarter of the year. Despite various controversies, with multiple scandals over the platform’s two decades of existence, Mark Zuckerberg’s social network seems to have managed to turn things around among social media users.

At least, so suggests research carried out by Morning Consult, which examined Americans’ favorability towards Facebook. According to Morning Consult Brand Intelligence, the platform has won back the favor of American users by reducing the presence of news articles on the site.

According to a report by Similarweb and Axios, referral traffic from Facebook to news sites has fallen by 80% since September 2020. Since the implementation of this new strategy, the platform’s net favorability rating (which measures the share of respondents who said they had a favorable impression of Facebook minus the share of those who did not) has increased since 2021.

“While favorability isn’t directly correlated with user growth – amid declining favorability between 2017 and 2020, Facebook’s US and Canada daily user count was mostly flat or slightly up quarter-over-quarter – it’s still an indication of where users are willing to spend their time relative to other social players. Additionally, consumers are likely more receptive to ads on platforms that they hold a favorable opinion on versus those they dislike,” the research reads.

For some time now, Mark Zuckerberg has decided to offer less political content, a subject considered too divisive and potentially contributing to the spread of “fake news” on his platform. “With favorability notably increasing across party lines, this suggests that a downtick in political news has effectively minimized the number of divisive posts users encounter.

It also means that Facebook should continue to de-emphasize political news content, which is in line with Morning Consult analysis that finds that distributing news hurts trust in social networks,” reads the report. Moreover, “we argued in 2022 that platforms should consider becoming more reliant on light-hearted content,” says Morning Consult.

Facebook passed the three-billion monthly active user mark in 2023. As of June 30, more than two billion people visited Meta’s social network every day, an increase of 5% in one year. This growth came mainly from the Asia-Pacific region, while it was flat in North America and declined slightly in Europe. By comparison, Instagram has two billion monthly active users and TikTok over one billion. X (formerly Twitter), Snapchat and Telegram count less than a billion. – AFP Relaxnews