• by Colin Kirkland , Staff Writer, November 2, 2022

In a move to attract as much top talent as possible to Facebook, Meta has invited all creators across the globe to use professional mode, a feature the nervous tech giant introduced last December to help select creators build their presence and influence on the app.

Similar to Pages for business, professional mode offers creators a separate Facebook profile on which they can share their work and expand their audience.

“With professional mode, you can use professional tools to build a public following, earn money from various monetization programs, and connect with your audience in more meaningful ways,” the company says. “And you can do it all on the profile you already have on Facebook.”

These features are a notably wide range of analytics insights and tools to help creators monetize their content and persona, including Meta’s Reels Play bonus program, which allows creators to earn money from the Reels they create, and Stars for donations directly from their audience via Live video, Reels, and video-on-demand (with new formats coming soon, including photo and text posts.)

Creators who join professional mode will also receive access to in-stream ads, which invite creators to “earn money by enabling ads before, during and/or after longer videos on demand on Facebook,” says Meta.

The company is also using professional mode to test Ads on Reels with “a group of creators” globally.

Other new features (strap in because yes, somehow there are more) being tested on professional mode include:

1. Subscriptions to creator content
2. Top Fans, which is a type of rewards program that lets creators interact with their most engaged fans while offering them badges, etc.
3. An invitation setting allowing users to invite friends to follow their favorite creators
4. Reels Collabs in which creators can co-author Reels
5. An audience outreach feature that invites creators to boost eligible content as ads

The Professional Dashboard, which was originally introduced with the launch of professional mode, is here to stay, allowing creators to view audience and profile insights, as well as content performance metrics on comments, engagement, reactions and shares.

With professional mode, creators can also schedule posts in advance (with recommended post times, including the option to cross-post content to specific audience groups), as well access a new Creator Support Hub featuring additional support and educational materials on monetization, eligibility, verification requests and more.

Finally, eligible creators will have more power over comments on their public posts (with “Choose Who Can Comment”) and the ability to assign a trusted moderator for chats on Live.

The bottom line is that Meta’s introduction of “a profile setting that provides creator opportunities to anyone who wants to become a creator” aims to attract as many wannabe creators as possible (of which there are many, according to a new survey results from HigherVisibilty show 1 in 4 members of Gen Z want to emulate these celebrities,.

However, the question becomes whether or not an exhaustive list of helpful creator tools (many of which are still in testing) will lure creators to Facebook, a platform that has depreciated monetarily and culturally, especially in the eyes of Gen Z, a generation that has left the bones of Facebook to their parents and grandparents and instead flocked to short-form video social apps like TikTok and YouTube.

Since naming his company Meta, CEO Mark Zuckerberg continues to hemorrhage billions of dollars while diving nose-first into the promise of the metaverse, a futuristic experience he has not made accessible and understandable to the majority. In other words, no one is along for the ride.

Which is why it’s difficult not to see the global expansion of professional mode as a desperate attempt to attract enough creators to engage users enough to push Zuck’s struggling metaverse vision -- and the VR and AR technologies he sees as someday becoming widely adopted tools to access said vision.

Enough.