Facebook is planning a major update to one of its oldest features in an effort to attract more young people to the platform.
More than two decades after it was first introduced, the world’s biggest social media app is revamping the ‘Poke’ button to make it a more central part of Facebook.
“Pokes never really left but they’re making a comeback in a major way,” Facebook said in a post explaining the new update. “Now you can see who poked you and find other friends to poke.”
Facebook said users will also be able to see their “Pokes-count” with friends on a dedicated page that alerts them each time they receive one.
The move comes after Facebook noted last year that the “poke is having a moment”, registering a 13x spike in their usage.
Facebook remains the most popular social media platform, with more than a third of the world’s population using it at least once per month, but it has struggled to attract new users in recent years.
Earlier this year, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said he wanted to bring back “OG” features to the social network to improve connections between friends and draw in a younger demographic.
Facebook’s main feed has transitioned towards algorithmically-generated content in recent years, serving up content from accounts that users do not follow in order to boost engagement.
Speaking on the Colin and Samir podcast in March, Mr Zuckerberg explained his decision to bring back the ‘Friends’ tab to Facebook.
“This is phase one of bringing back OG Facebook,” he said. “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 to go after and build, which is just to kind of go one-by-one and build up a 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.”
