Facebook have introduced a free discovery and curation tool, called Signal, for Facebook and Instagram. This tool helps 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.
Journalists use Signal tool to surface relevant trends, photos, videos and posts from Facebook and Instagram for use in their storytelling and reporting. This is an easy way to source and curate content from major public events across news, culture, entertainment, sports, and more. Journalists can then embed that curated content online and integrate it into their broadcasts.
They can monitor what topics are trending on Facebook and discover related public content. They can also find stories as they grow in importance and potentially go viral powered by CrowdTangle. Also they could immediately surface and embed authenticated content and trending stories powered by Storyful.
Journalists interested in seeing what conversations are resonating on Facebook can monitor which topics are trending and then quickly display related content that has been shared publicly—unranked and in chronological order— from both people and Pages for deeper context on those trends. Search functionality makes it easy to surface content directly related to a story or topic they are tracking.
They can access lists of public figures ranked by who is being mentioned the most on Facebook, including real-time conversations across Politicians, Authors, Actors, Musicians, Sports Teams, Players, and more.
And they can compare share of voice between public figures for the last 24 hours.
Journalists can Search Instagram for visual content surrounding news events around the world. This is done by using location-tag and topic-related search functionality. They can search for public posts related to specific hashtags, associated with specific public accounts, or tagged with locations using an interactive global map.
Every Facebook post, every Instagram image or video, and every metric found in Signal can be easily saved into custom collections for later use in a downstream CMS for digital writers or for integration with broadcast graphics packages for broadcast teams.
Journalists can easily embed any Facebook and Instagram post in their online coverage by simply selecting and copying the post’s embed code.
Newsrooms can integrate Signal APIs to feed curated content onto their websites and into their broadcasts, as well as produce native visualizations of curated Instagram content for events.
Signal is now available at no cost to journalists and leverages Facebook’s own Media Solutions APIs, as well as third-party APIs including CrowdTangle and Storyful who each power feeds within the product.
If you are a journalist you can request access to Signal here. Currently, Signal is only available to journalists and is most useful for English-language newsrooms.
