“Today we’re excited to introduce Signal, for Facebook and Instagram, a free discovery and curation tool for journalists who want to source, gather, and embed newsworthy content from Facebook and Instagram, across news, culture, entertainment, sports, and more all in one place”. By making use of hashtag or location, the reporters can seek out stories and sources of their interest on both the platforms – Facebook and Instagram.
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Part of the usefulness of Signal is that it gives journalists access to multiple highly sorted newsfeeds of public content. Right now, items like the Trending topics feature are influenced by a users personal profile interests including what pages they’ve liked and what content they engage with.
Called Facebook Signal, the new service allows journalists, writers, bloggers, whatever badge they apply to themselves, to search through Facebook to surface relevant trends, photos, videos, and posts on Facebook, and notably Instagram as well, for use in their writing and reporting. Facebook Signal happens to be a brand new tool that will hopefully encourage journalists to find as well as share news from the network, which might also see the undermining of Twitter along the way.
In terms of strategy, Signal marks yet another Facebook product that courts the news industry.
If you are a Journalist (or a blogger), all you need to do is head over to this link, fill up a form and you will receive a mail from Facebook asking to confirm!
Andy Mitchell, director of media partnerships at Facebook, said that media organizations had been asking for a way to better use the social network for reporting purposes. Facebook will now have to come up with a way of enticing most of these journalists to switch their allegiance if it is to bolster engagement levels on the platform. The company’s Instant Articles program that is in development, will enable stories and articles to appear directly on the social network rather than being sent to users through third-party media outlets’ websites.
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Facebook shows trending topics in the little ticker in the upper corner of one’s newsfeed, but it is capable of so much more. Last week, the company made its live streaming Mentions app available to any user who can verify his or her account.
