Facebook Offers New Windows Into Social Conversation:
Facebook is releasing two new search tools on Monday
designed to give news organizations — and potentially, marketers — more
insights into the real-time social conversation occurring on Facebook,
particularly around television shows, big news and sporting events.
One of the new tools will allow news organizations to use
keywords such as “Syria vote” or “Tokyo Olympics” to search Facebook for posts
on those topics that an individual user or a company has designated as public.
Mass Relevance
A screen shot of one of Facebook’s new search tools.
“This is a way for news organizations to tap into and
understand what people are talking about,” said Andy Mitchell, Facebook’s
director of partnerships, in an interview. “The possibilities are kind of
endless, once we have this in the hands of talented, creative journalists.”
The new tools are the latest salvo in Facebook’s recent
campaign to catch up to and perhaps surpass Twitter as the leading platform for
online public conversation.
Because most Twitter users set up their accounts to
broadcast their posts publicly, the micro blogging service has become
invaluable for those looking for insights into the broad social zeitgeist as
well as the momentary obsessions of the public. (On Sunday, for example,
Twitter users in the United States were obsessed by football, according to its
trending topics tool.)
Twitter is also wooing advertisers and television stations
by helping them target users tweeting about popular TV shows and sporting
events while they are occurring.
Facebook, which has roughly five times as many users
globally as Twitter, has a similarly valuable trove of data. For example, the
company said that last week, the beginning of the N.F.L. season garnered over
20 million likes, comments, and shares on Facebook by over 8 million people.
However, most posts on Facebook’s social network are not
public, but instead limited to friends or even smaller groups of people. So
Facebook must carefully weigh what information it can release, particularly as
it endures another round of attacks over proposed changes to its privacy
policies.
Still, the company has been more aggressive recently in its
efforts to establish its bonafides as an online town square. It June, it began
giving its 1.2 billion users the ability to search posts using hash tags, such
as #NFL, much the way they can do on Twitter.
It is testing a “trending topics” module on the main news
feed page that would show users the most popular subjects that people are
talking about on Facebook. And it recently rolled out embedded posts, which
allows anyone to include public Facebook posts, including video, in their own
Web page.
The newest tools are another step in that direction.
Initially, they will only be available to a handful of news
organizations — Buzz feed, CNN, NBC News, Sky Television and Slate — for
testing and improvement. Facebook will also provide access to Mass Relevance, a
firm that helps companies analyze and use social media to improve their
interaction with customers. But Facebook said it intends to extend access to
other media and marketing firms soon.
Those selected to test the tool are eager to try it out.
“As a news organization, we’re always trying to answer what
are people talking about,” Ryan Osborn, vice president of digital innovations
and social media at NBC News, said in an interview.
He said that NBC plans to use the tools to help it conduct
an online town hall this week called “Taking Sides: Should the U.S. Strike
Syria?” ahead of the Congressional vote on President Obama’s request for authorization
to conduct military action against Syria’s government for its apparent use of
chemical weapons. It may also be used on the Today show.
KC Estenson, senior vice president and general manager of
CNN Digital, said that CNN hopes to get different insights from the Facebook
data than it currently gets from Twitter.
“You might get a little bit more personal and intimate sense
of who a person is off their Facebook usage than their Twitter usage,” he said.
He said that the tools will not supplant on-the-ground
reporting by correspondents, but will supplement it. “This is the social media
equivalent of man-on-the-street reporting,” he said. “Over time, we’ll be able
to put a lot more intelligence against that.”
It’s less clear how news organizations will be able to use
the aggregated, anonymized data about private discussions, but Mr. Estenson
said that he expects it will provide another way to take the pulse of the
public, much like formal opinion polls do.
“As a glimpse of what people are talking about, and how it
breaks down, those can be clues as to what’s going on in this world,” he said.
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