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Facebook is constantly trying to attract as many users and expand as much as possible. Now it has been reported that they are trying to attract journalists, or, better said, to lure them away from other platforms such as the equally famous Twitter.
The company has released a new dashboard on Thursday, September 17 to facilitate referencing and embedding content for people working in the media industry. The new product is called Signal and is not actually part of the social network, but it does have some Instagram and Facebook data for these professionals to make use of.
What the company actually wants is for posts to be as widely embedded as possible around the web, especially because it encourages famous people to share moments on Facebook.
The platform is expected to attract even more viewers through Signal, because users will be able to keep an eye on the newest trending articles. Journalists will have easy access to a lot of newsfeeds displaying public content.
Up until now, the users’ preferences were the ones that dictated what the trending topics were. Users would post whatever they liked in terms of news and content.
However, journalists are now given the chance to use these tools in order to discover new content and engage it in their own articles. Basically, a symbolic relationship will be born between professional writers and publications. In the future, their stories might be published on Facebook , thanks to Instant Articles and its followers.
The new technology behind Signal relies on Facebook’s Media Solutions APIs (application programming interfaces), but also on elements from CrowdTangle and Storyful. These help show emerging and trending news and posts on a variety of topics. They also issue a list of people that are mentioned most often and provide search tools that journalists can use for free.
People who use Signal can also create entire collections of both Facebook posts, Instagram pictures or videos that they can share and use later with their teams.
It remains uncertain how much the new tools will attract journalists, but platforms like Twitter are in real danger of losing professional users.
Image Source: cmsimpact
