For a long time, Meta has stifled competition by either purchasing the platform or offering similar services that are popular among users. This method has so far been successful with WhatsApp, Instagram, and Snapchat. However, another social networking site has recently gained traction, posing a significant danger to the corporation. TikTok has already been identified as a competitor by Meta.

“First, there’s competition. People have many options for how they want to spend their time, and applications such as TikTok are rapidly gaining popularity. And it’s for this reason that we’re putting so much emphasis on Reels in the long run. As is our work to ensure that our applications are the greatest services available for young adults, as I said on our previous call,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors earlier this year.

Tom Allison, Meta’s executive in charge of the Facebook app, outlined the specific measures the firm has to do to compete with ByteDance’s TikTok in an internal letter seen by The Verge. “The risk for us is that we disregard this as a type of social communication and connection that is not meaningful to people, and we fail to develop,” Allison said in the message to the staff.

Allison’s instructions to her team are simple: make Reels a success, develop world-class recommendation technology, and unleash messaging-based sharing. “They also represent some of the largest — but also most hard — possibilities to success with Young Adults,” Allison continued, referring to the company’s waning popularity among young users, who are increasingly migrating to platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

As part of the changes, Facebook will focus more on Reels, return Messenger to the main app (after nearly eight years as a separate app), and recommend posts from people users follow rather than posts from people they follow. Allison also mentions creating a ‘Discovery Engine’ in the document. In this post, I’d want to present the idea of Facebook as a “discovery engine,” which is a useful mental model for framing our long-term strategy’s current emphasis.