Meta’s push to pivot products across its social media companies amidst growing competition and regulatory policies threatening its business, is seeing a lift, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Early last month, Zuckerberg announced seven investment priorities for Meta, following a heavy drop in the company’s shares that saw Facebook lose more than $250 billion. The chief executive said that Meta will be focusing on Reels, community messaging, commerce, ads, privacy, AI, and of course the metaverse.
Giving an update on the progress the company has made so far, Zuckerberg wrote on Tuesday that Reels has been made available for creators globally.
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“Reels is already our fastest growing content format by far, and today we’re making it available to everyone on Facebook globally. We want Reels to be the best place for creators to connect with their community and make a living, so we’re launching new monetization tools too.
“We’re adding creative tools to Facebook Reels like Remix, and the ability to create a Reel from an existing story. We’re also building video clipping tools so that creators who publish live or long-form, recorded videos can test,” he said.
Last year, Apple began the enforcement of its new privacy policy, the App Tracking Transparency (ATT), which gives iPhone users the choice to disable Facebook’s tracking system, curtailing its ability to curate data for targeted ads. Facebook usually harvest the needed data for its targeted ads by tracking users across the web. In addition, TikTok has seen unprecedented growth globally, especially among young people – which poses a further competitive threat to Meta’s growth. Since 2012, the number of young users on Facebook has been on decline and only users 25 and above have been increasing their use of Facebook, according to internal research from Meta leaked by whistleblower former head of products Frances Haugen.
Zuckerberg said Meta will focus on short videos to counter TikTok’s intimidating growth. TikTok is a short-form video platform that gives users the opportunity to create contents and earn from them, a method Facebook has adopted through Reels.
“To give creators more visibility and reach, they can share their Instagram Reels as recommended content on Facebook. We’re also rolling out Reels in Facebook Watch and letting people share public Reels to Stories,” Zuckerberg said.
In addition to the declining number of Facebook users, Meta is facing the challenge of tightening privacy laws in Europe. The European data privacy watchdog GDPR, has been reviewing its rules targeting big tech companies to tackle growing issues of misuse of private data.
Early February, Meta warned that it would pull out of Europe if a new privacy rule that aims to halt it from transferring consumer data from Europe to the US is approved.