During Thursday’s Connect event, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company will be renamed “Meta” as part of a major rebrand. Meta will bring together Facebook’s family of apps while also developing new technologies for businesses, communities, and more.
The social media platform, Facebook, will still retain its name but the overarching company is being rebranded. Meta will now encompass brands such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, as a parent company. The rebrand is intended to help better reflect the company and what they hope to build in the near future. Since Facebook is still seen as a social media company, it is difficult to represent all the other company’s products using that name.
With this rebrand, the company hopes to establish itself as a metaverse company and not just a social media company. This transition is meant to happen over the next few years. This will also allow the company to venture further into Virtual Reality for gaming, work, and communication.
The company is planning to divide its financial results into two segments, Family of Apps and Reality Labs. This change will take effect starting Q4 2021. The company will also be trading under the MVRS stock ticker symbol starting December 1. Furthermore, Facebook has secured both the “meta.com” domain name and Twitter handle “@meta”.
Facebook has been under a lot of scrutinies after a former employee publicly released documents suggesting that Facebook is aware of the dangers of its platform. Still, the company hasn’t taken adequate steps to fix these issues and protect its users. This rebrand could be the fresh start Facebook needs to rebuild its reputation and reposition the company is a technology firm with a new focus on virtual reality.
