Facebook is upgrading this 21-year-old feature to attract young users, company says: 'Now you can see who…'

Facebook is planning a significant upgrade to one of its oldest features, the "Poke" button. The popular social media platform has decided to update this feature in an effort to appeal to a younger demographic. The company is reintroducing the feature, which was first launched over two decades ago, as a more central part of the social media platform. The move is part of a broader strategy to attract and retain a new generation of users. In a post explaining the latest update, Facebook said: “Pokes never really left, but they’re making a comeback in a major way. Now you can see who poked you and find other friends to poke.”The company said users will now have a dedicated page to view their “Pokes-count” with friends, which notifies them whenever they receive one. This move follows the company’s note last year that the “poke is having a moment,” after recording a 13x spike in usage. Facebook is still the world’s most widely used social media platform, with over a third of the global population logging in at least once a month, but its growth in attracting new users has slowed in recent years.

What Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said about bringing back older features to Facebook

Earlier this year, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said he aimed to revive “OG” features on the platform to strengthen connections between friends and appeal to a younger audience. In recent years, Facebook’s main feed has shifted toward algorithm-driven recommendations, often showing content from accounts users don’t follow to increase engagement. In March, during an appearance on the Colin and Samir podcast, Zuckerberg explained his decision to reintroduce the ‘Friends’ tab on Facebook.“This is phase one of bringing back OG Facebook. A lot of the fun and useful parts of the original experience, we just sort of didn’t focus as much on. And not only did we not focus on them as much, but... I realised no one else actually recreated a lot of these things that used to be pretty magical about Facebook, either. I actually think that there's this whole opportunity that I think is going to be pretty fun to go after and build, which is just to kind of go one-by-one and build up a bunch of these things that used to be these joyful experiences that people had as part of Facebook that just kind of don't exist on the internet today," he said.