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Facebook has experienced its fair share of scrutiny over the past year, and now, the social media giant is looking to move past the controversy by announcing some pretty major news – the company is rebranding and changing its name to Meta.
For those wondering, “why Meta?,” according to founder Mark Zuckerberg’s official founder’s letter posted to Facebook, the new name represents “an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it. We call this the metaverse, and it will touch every product we build.”
A press release added that “Meta’s focus will be to bring the metaverse to life and help people connect, find communities and grow businesses.”
“The metaverse will feel like a hybrid of today’s online social experiences, sometimes expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world. It will let you share immersive experiences with other people even when you can’t be together — and do things together you couldn’t do in the physical world. It’s the next evolution in a long line of social technologies, and it’s ushering in a new chapter for our company.”
For marketing professionals panicking about what this means for their Facebook and Instagram ads, don’t worry. The name change will not apply to individual platforms owned by Meta (previously known as Facebook), only the parent company that owns them. Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp will all keep their names and branding.
How Google Reacted
Once the news dropped yesterday, Google reacted pretty quickly, with the search engine ranking news and content for Meta almost immediately.
Even Google staff like John Mueller and Danny Sullivan commented about it over on Twitter:
And our Google results figured out the new page for the search of pretty fast. pic.twitter.com/maz4SUx4Kp — Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) October 28, 2021
I wonder if this will throw off rankings & search results for all the SEO sites talking about meta tags now. Do you get a lot of "meta" traffic? This will keep the SEO & web-dev community busy for months. — 🧀 John 🧀 (@JohnMu) October 28, 2021
That’s pretty much all we know right now about this big re-brand. You can learn more about the new direction the company is taking at https://about.facebook.com/meta.
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