Facebook Signal or #Hashtags– You Decide!

Social networking giant Facebook has started rolling out Facebook Signals—a tool to help people, especially journalists, to find relevant news on both Facebook and Instagram (a photo sharing network, owned by Facebook).

Until now, Twitter has been the only place for the media industry to look out for what’s happening in the world. And there have been concrete reasons for the media to be fond of Twitter. Journalists enthusiastically go to Twitter for breaking news, because it is easily found by going to a specific account for following the hashtag or by checking one’s own timeline to see if the tweet has been retweeted there.

The use of hashtag has been restricted on Facebook: you can use it to find a specific event or use it in your own posts. However, this restriction is going to change with Facebook Signals. According to the Facebook Signal launch page it is obvious that journalists will find what is trending on both Facebook and Instagram. This will make it fairly easy for them to embed the story in the posts they are working on.

Twitter, on the other hand, has been working on its own trending and discovery tool, but it has not raised much hope until now. Twitter also has a tool “Curator”, which is somewhat similar to Facebook Signal to woo the journalists.

If Facebook Signal and Twitter is compared head to head, the Facebook Signal scores some points over Twitter. The most conspicuous reason for this is Facebook seems to be able to compare trends better by ranking people or trends that are driving a certain conversation in terms of influence in descending order. And what more, the curated content can be fed directly to the journalist’s website that makes life a lot easier.

Let’s see, what Twitter’s take on that is.