Facebook is rolling out features that aim to bring fans closer to their favorite creators: fan challenges and customized top fan badges.
The fan challenges feature will allow creators to prompt their followers with specific challenges. Followers can participate by making a reel or a post as a response. To encourage more engagement and participation, the particular challenge hashtag will appear in a leaderboard that ranks the submissions in order of how many reactions it gets.
These kinds of challenges have been popular on short form video platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels, where users may participate in informal dance challenges, or riff on trending audio clips. Facebook is formalizing the trend into an actual feature by creating a landing page for specific creators’ challenges.
In one example, Facebook suggests a cooking creator could celebrate fall by inviting fans to share videos of their favorite recipes involving butternut squash.
Kalen Allen, a creator with 3.6 million Facebook followers, tested the feature with a challenge asking fans to make videos about their dreams and goals, yielding about 520 entries. Meta says fans have submitted 1.5 million challenge entries over the last three months, while the feature was being tested.
Facebook is also allowing creators to customize the “top fan” badges that appear next to users’ names who engage most with their content. So, instead of being designated just a “top fan” of Ed Sheeran, you can be a “Sheerio,” if that’s your thing. Other celebrities like Cardi B and J Balvin have also enabled custom badges.
Facebook generally isn’t regarded as being as creator-centric as Instagram, which recently celebrated its 3 billion monthly active user milestone. It’s more the kind of place you’d go to read the latest drama about bike lanes in your neighborhood Facebook group, or where you’ll accidentally encounter AI Shrimp Jesus.
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These updates show us that Meta wants fans to take Facebook more seriously as a platform to engage with creators.
These features are designed to ramp up engagement — and this time from actual humans. Last week, Meta announced that it would introduce a Reels-like video feed on its Meta AI app, which is purely comprised of AI-generated videos.
