Social networking giant Facebook has released a new tool to help journalists find, organise and publish content found on its extensive network, a move seen as an attempt to counter Twitter's dominance in the media sector. The tool called Signal, helps journalists find, source, and embed content from 1.5 billion Facebook users and Instagram's 300 million users for storytelling and reporting.
The tool will be free for journalists. "We've heard from journalists that they want an easy way to make Facebook a more vital part of their newsgathering with the ability to surface relevant trends, photos, videos, and posts on Facebook and Instagram for use in their storytelling and reporting," Andy Mitchell, director of media partnerships at Facebook wrote in a blog post. He stated that media organisations had been asking for a strategy to higher use the social community for reporting functions. Journalist currently use Twitter to track breaking news and they also use it as a platform to share and re-distribute their work. But Facebook has been trying to challenge Twitter by offering journalists and media outlets a range of tools and services for finding and distributing their content. This launch comes a week after Facebook made its 'Mentions' app available to journalists with verified profiles.
That app, which lets users track mentions of themselves and stream live video, was previously only for public figures like athletes and actors. If 'Mentions' is for outward-facing content and self-promotion, 'Signal' ? which is desktop-only for now ? designed to make the backend of the news-gathering process easier. 'Signal' is simply the newest of Facebook's efforts to intertwine itself with the journalist and media publications which have discovered success attracting an enormous viewers by way of the social community. The group of tools will give journalists a behind-the-scenes look at what is trending on Facebook and find more on those topics.
Key features:
Discover what’s trending now on Facebook
Journalists interested in seeing what conversations are resonating on Facebook can monitor which topics are trending and then quickly display related content that has been shared publicly—unranked and in chronological order— from both people and Pages for deeper context on those trends. Search functionality makes it easy to surface content directly related to a story or topic they are tracking.
See data on who is driving the most conversation on Facebook
Journalists can access lists of public figures ranked by who is being mentioned the most on Facebook, including real-time conversations across Politicians, Authors, Actors, Musicians, Sports Teams, Players, and more.
Using location-tag and topic-related search functionality, journalists can search Instagram for public posts related to specific hashtags, associated with specific public accounts, or tagged with locations using an interactive global map.
Curate Facebook and Instagram content for newsgathering and packaging
Every Facebook post, every Instagram image or video, and every metric found in Signal can be easily saved into custom collections for later use in a downstream CMS for digital writers or for integration with broadcast graphics packages for broadcast teams.
Easily embed content and data from Facebook and Instagram in online and offline coverage
Journalists can easily embed any Facebook and Instagram post in their coverage by simply selecting and copying the post’s embed code. Newsrooms can integrate Signal APIs to feed curated content onto their websites and into their broadcasts, as well as produce native visualizations of curated Instagram content for events.
