Meta is currently testing a new Facebook profile option that
allows users to create multiple profiles connected to one main account. In Meta’s
words, “certain Facebook members will be able to create as many as four
additional profiles, and each one won’t need to include a person’s real name or
identity.”
The purpose of this addition is to encourage users to engage across the platform, considering that Facebook’s usage in the past few years has declined. With multiple profiles, each one can be used to interact with a separate group of people, like friends, family members, co-workers, etc. As a result, users wouldn’t have to worry about having all of their content be viewed by all different people on their main accounts, rather they could post content appropriate to separate groups on separate profiles.
Another useful element in the option of separate profiles is
that each profile will have its own News Feed. This means that users wouldn’t
have to worry about seeing irrelevant posts in their feed, as people have
complained to Facebook about political content taking over their News Feed.
While separate profiles could be a great tool for engagement,
we aren’t really sure if people would actually want to try them out. Facebook had
previously rolled out a similar feature of alternative, topic based News Feeds,
which wasn’t a hit, and in fact created messy-looking topic feeds cluttered
with all kinds of spam and junk content.
