Meta Launches Collaborative Collection: The Future of Private Sharing

In the last few years, people have begun to move away from public sharing on social media platforms and towards private conversations. To help capitalize on this trend, Meta has just released a new post-sharing feature specifically for Instagram called Collaborative Collections. With this new feature, users can easily join or start conversations with other Chat users, kickstarting conversations around trending posts and easily adding posts to the discussion. 

Collaborative Collections makes it easier for users to start conversations with their friends, rather than simply sharing a post with one person or copying and pasting a link. Meta believes that this shift is due to the increasing division and intensity of conversations that can often be seen in comment sections and the tendency of people to be wary of risking disagreement or offending someone by posting something controversial or unpopular. 

Explaining the trend, an internal report from Meta noted that while time spent on Facebook is on the rise, the amount of original content being shared on Facebook and Instagram has seen a dramatic decline. Instead, users are turning to these social media platforms as discovery sources, using them to find the latest content, which they then share privately in DMs. 

Understanding the importance of this privatized approach to social media engagement, Meta has been rolling out additional features, such as messaging ‘Channels’ on Instagram, highlights of past shares in your IG Direct inbox, and the reintegration of Messenger into the main Facebook app. Meta hopes that by focusing on the private side of social media, it will become the leading platform for person-to-person engagement.

In conclusion, with the launch of Collaborative Collections, Meta is helping to facilitate further this shift from public to private social media conversations. By leveraging its strengths in the area of private person-to-person interactions, Meta hopes to remain a critical interactive element in the social media landscape, even with the rise of platforms such as TikTok.