Once upon a time, not long ago, Facebook was a place you’d go to dump your photos from the weekend and comment on friends’ life milestones. Today, newsfeeds — like the one that Facebook made famous — more closely resemble broadcast TV than a town square, and that change is accelerating with Facebook’s new Explore tab.

That shift has been accelerated, if not started, by TikTok. The revolutionary social media channel burst onto the scene by showing us content from around the world that we didn’t even know we wanted to see. Quickly, TikTok began to compete not only with Facebook and Instagram, but with Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, et al. for their share of our attention.

Attention is the currency of all media channels, so when one competitor is able to capture such an astonishing amount of the market in such a short period of time, the entire industry responds, and quickly.

Today, the majority of content we all consume is not from our small circle of friends, but from creators who are all competing to entertain us in order to win our screen time.

Facebook’s latest update is a major reaction to that shift, and if it’s successful, it’s only going to further accelerate the move away from community-based social media towards a more consumption-driven experience, similar to how people use Netflix or TikTok.

Soon, when you open your Facebook app, you’ll see a new tab dedicated to surfacing content from accounts you haven’t chosen to follow yet. The idea is that the algorithm knows better than we do about the types of posts we want to see, similar to how TikTok has accomplished the same thing.

Facebook does have one major distinction: It claims to be focusing on local content. They believe that young people, in particular, will be drawn to posts from local creators and pages. That’s because these posts are likely to feature activities and interests that are relevant to the user’s location and preferences.

So What?

While it remains to be seen if the shift towards consumption-based social media is a good thing for us all, the new paradigm may be an opportunity for those of us who are trying to get our brand stories in front of new audiences — particularly local ones.

We have seen businesses thrive on TikTok, while their Instagram and Facebook growth stagnates because of this very difference. When creators produce content that educates, entertains, or otherwise engages viewers, TikTok rewards them by showing this content to increasingly larger audiences.

This requires a fundamental re-thinking of our content strategies. Where we used to think about our social media channels as a place to connect and engage with our most loyal fans, those conversations are now happening in places like Channels and Groups. Instead, our public-facing content is all about leveraging the Explore tab to earn access to new audiences, and we do that by reconsidering who we’re competing with.

Now, instead of showing up among photos of friend and life updates, our content is competing for attention next to content creators, news media, and TV shows.

The good news is the type of content that’s winning is not the Hollywood-style high-production videos. Instead, if we look at TikTok as an example, the content that’s succeeding is the type that lets people in, tells a relatable story, and establishes a connection with the audience.

One more proof point of this shift is the fact that both Facebook and Instagram are about to expand the types of content that appear in the Explore tab. Instead of being limited to Reels, soon every photo and carousel post that has music will be eligible to be featured there.