Facebook is introducing new features designed to bring fans closer to their favorite creators. These features are called fan challenges and customized top fan badges.
The fan challenges feature will allow creators to prompt their followers with specific tasks. Followers can participate by making a reel or a post as a response. To encourage more engagement, each challenge will use a hashtag and a leaderboard that ranks the submissions based on how many reactions they receive.
This type of challenge has already been popular on other short-form video platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels, where users often participate in informal dance challenges or use trending audio clips. Facebook is now formalizing this trend into an official feature by creating a dedicated landing page for specific creator challenges.
For example, a cooking creator could celebrate the fall season by inviting fans to share videos of their favorite recipes using butternut squash. One creator with 3.6 million followers tested the feature by asking fans to make videos about their dreams and goals, which resulted in about 520 entries. During testing over the last three months, fans have submitted 1.5 million challenge entries in total.
Facebook is also allowing creators to customize the “top fan” badges that appear next to the names of users who engage most with their content. This means a fan could be designated with a unique name like “Sheerio” for Ed Sheeran instead of a generic “top fan” label. Other celebrities like Cardi B and J Balvin have also enabled these custom badges.
Facebook is generally not seen as being as focused on creators as its sister platform, Instagram. It is often considered a place for community group discussions rather than creator content. These new updates indicate that Meta wants fans to view Facebook more seriously as a platform for engaging with creators.
The features are intended to increase engagement from real people. This follows a recent announcement from Meta about a new short-form video feed on its Meta AI app, which is populated entirely by AI-generated videos.