Facebook Adds Twitter-Like Features To Its Trending Section

This week, Facebook is bringing “Trending” to mobile by adding some Twitter-like features to the still new service. Facebook initially launched its Trending section at the beginning of this year in an attempt to keep users on its platform when they search for breaking news, instead of having them leave the site to check Twitter.

Facebook is continuing to move in the direction of being a hub for connecting the entire world, as opposed to simply being intended as a place for users’ immediate social networks.

“People gather on Facebook to talk about what’s happening in the world,” wrote Facebook Product Managers Diana Hsu and Andrew Song in a joint blog post. “In January, we introduced Trending to help people discover timely and relevant conversations about the news that they care about. Today, we’re bringing Trending to mobile and making it easy for people to explore stories from different sources.”

Facebook’s blog post continues by explaining that when a user taps on a topic in Trending, they will see conversations organized in up to five different sections:

1. Articles shows how news organizations are covering the story.
2. In the Story shows posts from people who are part of the story.
3. Friends and Groups shows what people in your network are saying.
4. Near the Scene shows posts from people near where the story is unfolding.
5. Live Feed shows a real-time stream of reactions from people around the world.

Clearly, this functionality is intended to replace the need for Facebook users to go to Twitter for breaking news information. The focus on Trending is part of a broader effort by Facebook to increase the relevancy of its content. The social media giant has recently started to give greater consideration to timeliness and activity-based relevancy overall. Users are now more likely to see “trending” stories in their News Feed, but only after a “friend” expresses an interest in that particular story.

“The way that your Trending topics are determined hasn’t changed, and as always, only public posts and posts that you are in the audience for (like updates from friends or groups that you belong to) will be shown in Trending,” explained Facebook.

Although Facebook’s news may lag a bit behind, just the fact that the company is adding this functionality could be seen as a big deal by its competitors. On average, users already spend a massive amount of time on the social network, and providing additional information such as trending stories removes yet another reason for users to leave the site to check somewhere else. This change will almost certainly help Facebook to further increase the time spent on its network and the popularity of its service.

The update has started to roll out in the U.S. for the web and Android, but Facebook promises that support for iOS and other countries will soon follow.