Facebook Adds Fan Challenges and Custom Badges for Creators

Facebook is rolling out new features designed to bring fans closer to their favourite creators, including fan challenges and customised top fan badges.

The fan challenges feature allows creators to prompt their followers with specific challenges. Followers can participate by creating a Reel or posting a response. To encourage engagement, the challenge hashtag will appear in a leaderboard that ranks the submissions by the number of reactions they receive.

These kinds of challenges have long been popular on short-form video platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels, where users join informal dance challenges or remix trending audio clips. Facebook is now formalising this trend by creating dedicated landing pages for each creator's challenges.

Image Credits: Meta

For example, a cooking creator could celebrate fall by inviting fans to share videos of their favourite recipes involving butternut squash.

Kalen Allen, a creator with 3.6 million Facebook followers, tested the feature with a challenge that asked fans to create videos about their dreams and goals, generating approximately 520 entries. Meta reports that fans have submitted 1.5 million challenge entries over the past three months, during the feature's testing period.

Facebook is also introducing custom top fan badges, allowing creators to personalise the titles that appear next to their most engaged followers. Instead of simply being a "Top Fan" of Ed Sheeran, for example, you might now be labelled a "Sheerio." Other celebrities, such as Cardi B and J Balvin, have also embraced the new custom badges.

While Facebook isn't typically seen as creator-centric as Instagram — which recently celebrated its 3 billion monthly active users — these updates demonstrate Meta's intention to enhance Facebook's role as a hub for creators and their communities.

These new tools are designed to ramp up authentic engagement between fans and creators — and unlike Meta's recent AI-generated Reels-like video feed, this interaction is powered entirely by real people.