In This Article:
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg teased a "return to OG Facebook" as part of his key goals for 2025 in Wednesday's Q4 earnings call with investors. While the company was short on details as to what specific changes lay in store, it's clear that Meta is in desperate need of younger Facebook users to sustain itself for the next generation.
Asked about his plans for the "OG Facebook," Zuckerberg replied that it was one of Meta's focus areas for the year ahead and something the company planned to both invest in and spend time on.
"I think there are a lot of opportunities to make [Facebook] way more culturally influential than it is today," he noted.
The exec also warned investors that these changes to Facebook may require some tradeoffs in terms of "maximizing business results in the near term" — a signal that revenues could be affected. He said the product changes would begin to roll out within half a year or so.
"I think some of this will kind of get back to how Facebook was originally used back in the day," Zuckerberg said, while tight-lipped on any other details.
Declining interest in Facebook among young people is becoming a problem for the tech giant, especially as its core adult users continue to age.
According to a study by eMarketer released last August, U.S. Gen Z users ages 18 to 24 spend far more time on TikTok, followed by Instagram and Snapchat — twice as much time, in fact, compared with the total U.S. adult population. Meanwhile, a 2024 survey by Pew Research found that U.S. teens' (13-17) use of Facebook had dropped sharply over the years from 71% in 2014-2015 to just 33%.
Often, what appeals to Gen Z isn't even the social networking aspects of Facebook; it's the more utilitarian features like Facebook Marketplace.
Meta has long been aware of these challenges, having launched a Gen Z-focused redesign of its aging social network in October 2024, promising greater emphasis on local community information, videos, and Facebook Groups, among other things.
The company now aims to build on those changes with a further refresh of the Facebook product in 2025, though its ability to compete with Gen Z's preferred app, TikTok, remains uncertain.
What's more, Gen Z users have sent a strong signal that they're ready to move on from Meta, if TikTok were to remain banned in the U.S. Instead of returning to Meta's platform, young people downloaded RedNote, another Chinese app similar to TikTok, ahead of and during the briefly enforced U.S. TikTok ban.