Journalists who turn to social media to look for story leads and news now have additional help from Facebook to mine data through all “the noise.”
The social media giant has launched Signal, which lets journalists search relevant trends, photos, videos and posts from Facebook and Instagram for use in their storytelling and reporting.
Journalists have to sign up and get approved by Facebook to have access. Once approved and logged in, Signal allows users to source and curate content from public news, culture, entertainment and sports events, allowing them to embed the curated content online and integrate it into their broadcasts.
Signal combines existing and new curation tools from Facebook in a central dashboard, providing an easy access for social discovery on the company’s two social networks.
In addition to Newswire, a feed of vetted stories trending on Facebook surfaced by the social news agency Storyful, there’s a Trending Posts column, which shows a stream of posts that are gathering momentum on Facebook. This feature is available thanks to a partnership with CrowdTangle.
Among the new tools is Leaderboards. This section tracks and analyzes conversation data across thousands of pages and additionally offers a comparison list that shows public figures and how they rank by being mentioned the most on Facebook.
For more details on how it works and to sign up, go to Facebook’s Signal page.