What will Facebook look like in 2024?

Launched in 2004, the crazy story of Facebook is part of our modern cultural landscape. Initially reserved for students at Harvard University, then used by a good number of students at top schools before being more widely distributed across the United States, then the world, Facebook will remain the precursor of social networking as we know it.

But in recent years, the use of social networks has evolved dramatically. Photos are retouched and profiles are refined. When we open Instagram, it seems a long time ago that we posted all our vacation photos on our Facebook wall. With the arrival of influencers, the use of social networks has become professionalized. Everything has to look good, be engaging, and publications are no longer aimed at an audience made up solely of close friends and family, but rather at those who, over time, will eventually become members of our community.

Faced with these new practices, Facebook struggled to pivot. Its engagement rate has plummeted, to an average per post of 0.07% according to Fingerprint. The problem was that Facebook was betting heavily on the "proximity" aspect of community , something its competitors were not positioning themselves on at all. While TikTok saw its growth explode thanks to an algorithmic strategy based on the tastes of its users, Facebook was sticking to its core business of displaying a mix of advertising and content posted by our friends in our News Feeds. An obsolete recipe, which Facebook finally decided to scrap last year.

Facebook: the evolution of algorithms

In 2022, Mark Zuckerberg claimed that 40% of the content offered to Facebook users would come from content creators they don't follow. In short, a strategy already adopted by all competing social networks. While this development is entirely justified, it took some time to implement, with the result that by the summer of 2022, only 15% of the content offered was based on users' interests. Facebook has now announced that this figure is set to double by the end of 2023, which suggests that the promised 40% will not be reached until well into 2024.

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Facebook: towards a paid subscription in 2024

Facebook and Instagram are now offering a paid subscription, enabling users to stay ad-free on their social networks. Of course, the paid subscription is not compulsory; it's simply a kind of premium subscription, which has the effect of preventing Meta from using your data.

The growth of Meta Verified :

You couldn't miss it, on Facebook and Instagram, everyone seems to have had a certified account since 2023. Like Twitter Blue, Meta certification is supposed to "lend credibility" to your account while confirming your identity. According to Bank of America, the number of Meta Verified subscribers should exceed 12 million in the first quarter of 2024.

A stop to the metaverse?

In 2021, the Facebook group became Meta, with the ambition of developing the metaverse. While the beginnings looked promising, with the promise of a new virtual world that made us all shudder, what followed was somewhat shadier. By 2022, Meta was losing $3.99 billion on innovations . For the first time, Meta was forced to implement a redundancy plan, and 20,000 people were laid off.

Is Facebook really in decline?

If the giant's downfall is frightening, the adjustments undertaken by Facebook have paid off in 2023. At the beginning of the year, Meta announced sales of $28.6 billion, while passing the 2 billion daily user mark. Reassuring figures, even if Meta still made a profit of $5.7 billion, 24% less than the previous year.

Meta develops AI tools

Unsurprisingly, the group that owns Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp is aligning itself with its competitors, and developing its own artificial intelligence. Called Meta AI, its aim is to "explore, create, do more". A promising slogan. On the official artificial intelligence website, Meta explains:

"We now have new creative tools that let you create and share personalized stickers or change the visual style of your photos with a simple text. Chat with 28 different AIs and get unique perspectives on topics such as travel, gaming and food. These new experiences will let you have fun, connect and learn something new."

But also :

"Currently in beta, Meta AI is an assistant you can chat with one-to-one or send messages to in group chats. It can give you recommendations when you need them, make you laugh when you need a good joke, settle a debate in a group chat and generally be there to answer your questions or teach you something new."

For the moment, AIs are only being deployed in the United States, and no release date has been announced for Europe.

What does Facebook look like in 2024?

It's clear that Facebook is going to continue the efforts of the last two years. With the advent of artificial intelligence, it's a safe bet that new content creation tools will arrive on the platform. For our part, we'd just like to have clearer answers from the social network on the question of engagement. While using Facebook is still a good idea for local businesses, it's no longer the case for many companies, and pages with non-existent engagement can testify to this. On this point, Facebook offers no advice other than to urge us to invest in advertising. Quite a clever response.