Facebook will tell you it has the best content in the world. Now it’s going out of its way to help journalists find that content and use it in their articles.
Facebook Wants More Journalists Using Facebook
Facebook launched a new content dashboard specifically for journalists.
iStock / Facebook composite
The company is rolling out a new dashboard Thursday to make it easier for those in the media industry to reference and embed Facebook content. The product, which Facebook is calling Signal, is separate from the actual social network and has some real-time Facebook and Instagram data for journalists to use. It has a list of trending topics and another list of “emerging” topics that are gaining in popularity. It also has a leaderboard showing which politicians, celebrities or athletes have been mentioned most often on Facebook that day.
The hope is that if Facebook makes this information easier to find, it will appear in other places on the Web — like the articles that journalists drum up every single day. Facebook is competing with other networks (see: Twitter) for your conversations around important and live events. If journalists believe those conversations are happening on Facebook, others likely will, too.
This isn’t the first time Facebook has pushed this idea. When Instagram updated its search feature back in June, part of the pitch to journalists at the time was that Instagram content would be easier to find and use in news and trend stories across the Web. Again, Facebook has more content than almost anyone online, so it’s in the company’s best interest to ensure people with a platform to share it can actually find it.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
