Facebook offers real-time audience data to news organisations with two new APIs

Facebook is fast trying to close the chasm that exists between Twitter and itself. The social networking giant has announced the roll out of a set of tools aimed at media and news organisations that will help surface Facebook conversations better.

Twitter has been synonymous with real-time conversation and data ever since it came into existence. Facebook, however, seems to be veering towards adding tools that aid real-time conversation on its website in the past few months as well. It has announced some more tools over the weekend that will try to bolster the social networking giant’s position as a relevant topic simulator too.

Facebook is making available Keyword Insights API and Public Feed API starting now. With the Keyword Insights API, news organisations and media outlets can aggregate the total number of posts that mention a specific term in a given time frame. The tool will also help display anonymous, aggregated results based off various filters like gender, age and location. For example, a news channel will now know exactly how many posts regarding Syria have been made on Facebook in the past one hour as well as what age group is talking about it most.

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Real time data for news outlets to know what’s being spoken about

The Public Feed API will display real-time feed of public posts for a specific word. Only public posts will be available for this API. Pages and Profiles that have the “Follow” option turned on will be included in this API.

Facebook says it is committed to building features that improve the experience of discovering and participating in conversations about things happening in the world right now, including entertainment, sports, politics and news. Currently, this feature will be rolled out to a limited number of news outlets and media houses like Buzzfeed, CNN, NBC’s Today Show, BSkyB and Slate. Hopefully, this feature will be rolled out to more news outlets soon.

These social APIs that will aid news outlets in gathering data about pressing topics with current relevance will work off certain features introduced by Facebook over the last few months. Facebook went the Twitter way by introducing hashtags and embeddable posts that users could choose to make use of. While embeddable posts helped media outlets especially take advantage of posts from the social networking website, driving up engagement, hashtags aided conversations. With users inserting hashtags into their posts, Facebook has a mine of real-time data the website is waiting to make use of. These two new APIs could just be the beginning of data mining activities by Facebook.