Facebook Wants to Be Your Place for Real Time Topics

Twitter’s claim to fame has been that it is THE place to discuss world events in real time. But, Facebook is now challenging that claim in the battle to be the digital water cooler. Facebook has a new Public Content Solutions team that is hiring TV execs, acquiring startups that analyze real-time event chatter, and forming partnerships so that news outlets can display Facebook’s generated topic stream. For example, Facebook just announced that NBC’s The Today Show will show Facebook trending topics on a giant in-studio touch screen. The show’s hosts can tap and swipe the screen to show Facebook posts of people discussing the topics. The Discovery Channel will also use Facebook’s new Hashtag Counter to let fans of car-racing show, Street Outlaws, vote for their favorite teams by posting to Facebook with the corresponding hashtag. Along a similar line, video views on Facebook have doubled in the past six months, prompting Facebook to adjust its News Feed algorithm to serve more videos to people who watch them and fewer to those who ignore them. The way Facebook ranks videos created on its site has also changed to include viewing time, in addition to likes, comments, and shares. This is, of course, all part of Facebook’s move to be the ‘go to’ place for all things digital.