Facebook is trying out a new tool that will help suggest stories for media companies to share.
The new feature called "Stories to Share" was launched on Monday, October 21, and is currently in the testing phase and will show up on the dashboard admin panel of a media publisher's Facebook page.
"Starting today for Facebook Pages of media organizations, we are beginning to test a new feature called "Stories to Share"," said Justin Osofsky, Facebook's VP of Media Partnerships and Global Operations.
The tool will suggest stories from renowned media sites like TIME, which can be posted on Facebook once the article shows high popularity with users.
"Stories to Share makes it even easier for media sites to find the most engaging content they might want to post on Facebook. For instance, TIME can see suggestions of stories they have published to TIME.com but they have not yet shared to their Facebook fans. They can now easily post any of those suggestions to their page directly from their Insights Dashboard in their admin panel," per Osofsky.
Facebook's new tool is not only proactive, but also aimed at driving traffic to news providers in a bid to stay ahead of rival Twitter.
"People come to Facebook to not only see and talk about what's happening with their friends but also read news and discover what is going on in the world around them. Because of this, we work closely with media organizations -- ranging from TV broadcasters to music startups to publishers -- to learn how they can maximize the value they get from Facebook. Over the past few months, we've worked particularly closely with news and publishing sites to understand how we can help drive more readers to their sites," notes Osofsky.
Facebook also revealed that its referral traffic from media sites has show an increase of more than 170 percent in the past year.
Facebook said referral traffic from its service to media sites has increased by more than 170 percent on average in the past year. Moreover, over a 7-day period, the social networking site worked with 29 media sites to get an idea of "how their referral traffic could be impacted" if the sites increased the frequency of posting to their Facebook pages. The results revealed that traffic was boosted by over 80 percent when using the service.
Corroborating Facebook's reach is social analytics firm SimpleReach, which reveal's that the social networking site "still drives more traffic than any other social network."
