Facebook plans to take on Twitter’s handle on current events

If you want to peruse holiday snaps you head to Facebook, but if you want the latest news on a world event you head to Twitter, right?

Well maybe not for much longer, as TechCrunch this morning reports Facebook is gearing up to take on Twitter as the go-to for real-time discussion of world events.

Facebook’s vice president of media partnerships, Justin Osofsky, told TechCrunch the social media giant is pouring resources into its new Public Content Solutions team, hiring TV executives, acquiring startups that analyse real-time event chatter and building new application programming interfaces (APIs) so news outlets can visualise its data and remind us where to discuss world events.

TechCrunch reports Facebook’s recent partnerships with NBC’s The Today Show and The Discovery Channel in the US, which will show Facebook trending topics on live-to-air television, are a bid to convince people that Facebook is where they should be talking about current events.

Osofsky told TechCrunch Facebook has an advantage in the current affairs battle too—its larger audience size and identity.

He said Facebook is looking at new tools tomake it easy for media outlets to visualise conversations happening on the social network. Over the past year, Facebook launched Trending topics, hashtags, embeddable posts, and verified accounts, plus new Trending, Topic Insights, Topic Feed, and Hashtag Counters.

Twitter is setting up its own defence, according to TechCrunch, aggressively hiring for its media partnerships team and experimenting with exceptions to its chronological stream that will surface replies and other activity in feeds.