Facebook’s Main Feed To Restructure its Focus On Video Content

A leaked internal memo reveals Facebook's plans to restructure its main feed around video content, such as Reels and stories, in the near future.
SIA Team
June 17, 2022

A leaked internal memo reveals Facebook’s plans to restructure its main feed around video content, such as Reels and stories, in the near future.

According to an internal memo sent to employees, Facebook intends to transform its main feed into a “discovery engine” for video content.

The memo was obtained by The Verge and published in its entirety. Though the memo is being released for the first time today, it was originally sent on April 27.

That means Facebook has already been carrying out its ‘near-term’ plans for a month and a half. These changes may be implemented sooner rather than later.

The following are the key points from the memo written by Facebook’s CEO, Tom Alison. He identifies three near-term priorities that will assist Facebook in realizing its vision; Make Reels a success, create cutting-edge recommendation technology and activate messaging-based sharing.

While Facebook intends to improve the discoverability of all content, it has identified short-form video as its biggest gap.

To fill that void, Facebook is making Reels more accessible by incorporating the short videos into more sections of the website.

Also, Facebook intends to develop a recommendation system that is responsive to people’s interests, capable of identifying trending content, and capable of making responsible choices in order to achieve its goal of becoming a discovery engine.

On the other hand, people are increasingly sharing and discovering content privately via messenger rather than publicly through the main feed. Facebook intends to capitalize on this by expanding the number of ways to share content via its messaging apps.