Judging from recent updates, Facebook and Twitter seem to be developing into two increasingly different social animals. Facebook is far more visual, but Twitter is just faster — especially for news.
That may soon be subject to change. In a Thursday announcement from Facebook's director of media relations Andy Mitchell, the company is launching Signal: "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."
The changes aren't significant or groundbreaking but they're helpful from a news categorization and sharing standpoint. It allows independent journalists and news organizations to monitor and share any trending news via Facebook or Instagram. The objective is to let people see the life of a trending topic through personal posts, images, metrics and real-time conversations.
In the spirit of providing a richer and more in-depth analysis of any trending topic, the new feature will organize data based on the amount of conversation that is happening around a specific topic, and – mainly through Instagram – provide a live visual feed of the topic as well. Journalists can search for this using the geo-tag and topic-related search functionalities.
Every post or metric that a journalist deems useful can be stored into "custom collections for later use in a downstream CMS for digital writers or for integration with broadcast graphics packages for broadcast teams." You also have the ability to easily embed a Facebook or Instagram post in your news coverage.
A lot of these features seem to be aimed at doing Twitter better than Twitter.
"This is a first step in helping journalists use Facebook and Instagram more effectively and we'll gather feedback and iterate to make Signal as useful as possible for industry professionals," said Mitchell.
