Here is how Facebook Signal tool helps Journalist

| Updated: Sunday, October 25, 2015, 10:50 [IST]

Facebook has been seen working on journalist friendly tools, not just to help the news writers' community but also to get more traction than micro-bogging site and arch rival Twitter. A few days after announcing the Mentions feature which is meant to cater to journalists, the social-networking giant has now revealed a new tool, called Signal.

Signal is a free newsgathering tool that has been developed to help journalists keep track of news on Facebook as well as Instagram as well as get readers' reaction related to news, or entertainment content, videos or photos.

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Signal is a free tool that will be available starting today for any journalist who requests access to search from Facebook.

Here we give five main features of the Signal tool:

Discover newsworthy content on Facebook and Instagram

Facebook says that Signal is a free discovery and curation tool for journalists. There is dashboard where writers can discover newsworthy content that is shared on across the social networking platforms, including Facebook and Instagram.

Look out for most talked about people in real-time

Apart from monitoring trending topics, the tool will also help journalists in gathering content for deeper context on the ongoing trending topics. For instance, the tool can help users track the name of a public figure that has been talked about on Facebook in real-time.

Access to pubic conversations and content

Using the tool, a journalist can also search to find public conversations, photos, or videos that can help them in their reporting or stories.

Search via hashtags or location

In order to search for stories or people, journalist can search on the basis of hashtag or location. The search feature is available on both Facebook and Instagram. The company says that a user can search for "public posts related to specific hashtags, associated with specific public accounts, or tagged with locations using an interactive global map", using the Search tool.

Embed links to posts or save for later use

For those who want to embed searched posts or content can easily embed them in their stories or write ups. Just in case one wants to save the searched content for later use, Signal allows doing so by saving content as custom collections for later use.