It's been a good week for Facebook. The company's ad revenue for the first quarter of 2014 grew 82% compared with the same quarter last year. Now the social network is moving closer to its goal of subsuming the Internet with the launch of FB Newswire, a "resource for journalists that aggregates newsworthy social content shared publicly on Facebook by individuals and organizations."
That's according to Facebook. But let's bring this down to Earth for PR pros: More than 1 billion people worldwide use Facebook, the company's success with mobile advertising means it's only going to keep growing and, with FB Newswire, the company is fixing it so journalists go to Facebook first for important news and trends.
So, then, what do you need to know about FB Newswire?
1. You can find FB Newswire at Facebook.com/FBNewswire, and on Twitter at @FBNewswire.
2. It's updated in real time with content related to the top news stories. Which means this could be a first stop for news in the morning—or in the middle of the night—if you're worried about breaking news impacting your industry.
3. FB Newswire is the result of partnership with News Corp.'s Storyful, which bills itself as "the first news agency of the social media age." Storyful relies on technology and human editorial expertise to aggregate—in the case of FB Newswire—newsworthy Facebook content, including "original photos, videos and status updates posted by people on the front lines of major events like protests, elections and sporting events."
4. Journalists will be able to embed the content they find through FB Newswire, although it's unclear what this means exactly.
5. For FB Newswire, Storify is selecting content with strong visuals. FB Newswire leans heavily on images shared by non-journalists for its posts.
6. FB Newswire doesn't do a great job of sourcing the written content of its posts. So before acting on any news posts in FB Newswire or commenting on them, be skeptical and do some verification of your own. That's good policy on social media in general—and in all areas of life.
Follow Steve Goldstein: @SGoldsteinAI
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