Wait, Are Creators Coming Back to Facebook?

We need to talk about Facebook again.

In September, we already made the case that Facebook isn't dead. We're not going to spend another 1,500 words telling you that your mum uses it, Groups are massive and Meta is quite good at advertising. But something more interesting is happening now.

Meta is actively trying to make Facebook a place creators want to be again.

It's paying them. Giving them more reach. Building new tools for brands to find them. Bringing Facebook creators into its creator marketing infrastructure. And, importantly, people are actually watching more video on the platform.

So rather than asking whether Facebook is dead, there's a much more interesting question for 2027:

Could Facebook become a proper creator platform again?

Meta is putting its money where its mouth is

Let's start with the fairly enormous number.

Meta reportedly paid creators almost $3 billion through Facebook monetisation programmes in 2025, up 35% year on year.

Three. Billion. Dollars.

That's not the behaviour of a company quietly letting Facebook become the place your aunt uploads holiday photos.

Meta clearly wants creators making more original content there.

And now it's trying to tempt creators over from other platforms too.

Its Creator Fast Track programme offers selected creators additional reach on eligible Facebook Reels alongside guaranteed payments for up to three months.

Creators with at least 100,000 followers can reportedly receive up to $1,000 per month, while those with more than one million followers can receive up to $3,000 per month.

Meta is essentially saying: come and give Facebook another go.

And that's worth paying attention to.

Because Facebook has had a creator problem

Facebook's issue has never really been a lack of people.

It still has around 3.07 billion monthly active users globally, while the UK has approximately 38.8 million Facebook users.

That's a fairly sizeable audience to have sitting around.

The problem is that creator culture moved somewhere else.

TikTok became the place creators broke through. Instagram became the place they built polished personal brands and commercial partnerships. YouTube remained home to longer-form creator businesses.

Facebook increasingly felt like somewhere content ended up afterwards.

Post the Reel on Instagram.

Post the TikTok.

Maybe tick the Facebook box while you're there.

Done.

Meta now appears to be trying to reverse that behaviour by giving creators an actual reason to think Facebook first, rather than Facebook eventually.

And people are actually watching

Paying creators isn't much use if nobody watches them.

Fortunately for Meta, there's movement there too.

Facebook video time increased 9% globally year on year in Q2 2026, rising by more than 10% in the US and Canada.

Meta has been changing its recommendation systems and putting greater emphasis on original video, while views and watch time for original Facebook Reels reportedly roughly doubled in the second half of 2025 compared with the same period a year earlier.

That's where this starts becoming more interesting for brands.

Facebook has an enormous audience.

Meta is trying to bring more creators onto the platform.

And video consumption is growing.

Put those three things together and there's potentially a creator opportunity marketers haven't really been planning for.

Facebook creators probably shouldn't look like TikTok creators

This is the bit we'd be careful about.

The answer isn't to take your TikTok creator strategy and copy and paste it onto Facebook.

Because Facebook doesn't need to become TikTok 2.0.

Its audience and behaviour give it a different opportunity.

Think food. Parenting. Travel. Home and interiors. DIY. Gardening. Automotive. Finance. Local recommendations. Family entertainment. Health and fitness.

Categories where knowledge, usefulness, trust and lived experience can be just as important as being first onto a trend.

Someone showing you how they renovated their kitchen.

A parent reviewing a product they've actually used for six months.

A gardener explaining why one tool is better than another.

A travel creator answering the 15 questions everyone has before booking somewhere.

That's creator content.

It just isn't necessarily the creator content we've spent the last five years talking about.

Your next brilliant creator might already have a Facebook audience

This is probably the part we'd be most interested in testing.

Brands have become very good at starting creator searches with Instagram and TikTok.

Facebook barely enters the conversation.

But what if you're looking for a 45-year-old homeowner interested in renovating their garden?

Or parents researching their next family holiday?

Or people obsessed with caravans, running, cooking, DIY, cars or very specific breeds of dog?

The audience you're looking for might already exist in enormous numbers on Facebook.

And the creator who has authority with them might not be the person appearing at the top of your usual TikTok search.

That's why we'd start looking at Facebook creator data as its own thing.

Who has an audience there? What are people watching? Who gets meaningful comments? Who gets shared into Groups? Which creators actually influence decisions?

Follower count alone won't answer any of that.

Audience behaviour might.

Meta is making it easier for brands to find them too

The timing here isn't accidental.

Meta launched its global Creator Marketing Hub in September 2026, bringing creator discovery, recommendations, messaging, ad-readiness tools and partnership activation together.

And Facebook creators are being added to Meta's Creator Marketplace API, which previously focused on Instagram creators.

That's quite an important shift.

Facebook creators become easier to discover.

Brands can understand whether they're ready for partnerships.

Creator activity gets closer to Meta's wider advertising infrastructure.

And suddenly Facebook isn't just somewhere creator content happens.

It becomes somewhere brands can more deliberately plan, buy and scale creator activity.

And then Meta can put its massive paid machine behind it

This is where Facebook has an advantage that shouldn't be ignored.

Meta is very, very good at advertising.

Its Q2 2026 results showed ad impressions across its Family of Apps increased 14% year on year, while company revenue increased 28% to $60.8 billion.

More interestingly, Meta reported that improvements to its advertising ranking and sequence-learning systems contributed to an 8.3% increase in ad clicks and a 15.7% conversion uplift on Facebook.

Now put creator content into that system.

A creator makes something useful.

Organic performance tells you people care.

You learn which message, product or angle is working.

Paid takes the strongest content and finds more of the people likely to act.

Then those results inform what creators make next.

Creator. Organic. Paid. Learn. Repeat.

That's a lot more interesting than paying someone to make a Reel, reporting the engagement rate and never thinking about it again.

Facebook might be particularly good for the unsexy stuff

And we mean that as a compliment.

Not every product naturally belongs in a TikTok trend.

Some things need explaining.

Some purchases take weeks rather than seconds.

Some audiences aren't trying to keep up with internet culture.

Sometimes somebody just wants a trustworthy person to explain which lawnmower they should buy.

That's where Facebook's slightly less fashionable audience could become its advantage.

Because social marketing doesn't always need to be culturally groundbreaking.

It needs to influence somebody.

And sometimes useful beats cool.

Don't start dumping every TikTok onto Facebook though

We can already see where this goes wrong.

“Facebook video is growing!”

Great.

“Let's automatically publish every TikTok there!”

Please don't.

If Meta is prioritising original content and trying to build a stronger creator ecosystem, brands need to actually understand what works with Facebook audiences.

Maybe the hook changes.

Maybe the creator changes.

Maybe the video needs more explanation.

Maybe a 45-second demonstration works better than a 12-second trend.

Maybe the comments tell you that people want completely different information.

That's the test.

Not whether your TikTok can technically also be uploaded to Facebook.

It can.

That doesn't make it a Facebook strategy.

Maybe Facebook's comeback is actually a creator comeback

That's what makes this feel different from the Facebook conversation we've been having for years.

We already know Facebook has scale.

We already know Meta's advertising machine is powerful.

We already know Groups and communities remain valuable.

The newer question is whether Facebook can build a creator ecosystem on top of all of that again.

Nearly $3 billion paid to creators in a year suggests Meta wants it to.

9% growth in video viewing suggests audiences are responding.

Creator Fast Track suggests Meta is prepared to actively poach creator attention from elsewhere.

And its new creator marketing infrastructure suggests brands are being invited into the equation too.

At Pepper, that makes us much more interested in testing Facebook creators in 2027, particularly for brands trying to reach mature, family, household and higher-consideration audiences.

Not because Facebook is suddenly cool again, or because TikTok and Instagram are going anywhere, and definitely not because we're feeling nostalgic for pokes.

There might be a huge creator audience sitting on a platform most brands have stopped bothering to look at.

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