Say Goodbye to the 'Trending' Resource on Facebook

By Lauren

It looks like we can wave goodbye to Trending, as Facebook announced on Friday that they will be removing the feature this week to make room for some new ways to explore news and trending topics on their platform.

Trending was originally created as a way for users to discover topics that were trending within the Facebook community, but it didn’t lead to many clicks for news publishers and the feature was only available in five countries. 

Facebook plans to continue being an outlet for publishers and news sources, but with users shifting to consuming news through video and on mobile platforms, it seems they hope to stay on top of these trends with some new news features they are currently testing.

The first is what they are calling a Breaking News Label. This would allow publishers to indicate when their posts feature “breaking news,” and potentially allow users to receive “breaking news” notifications.

They also are looking into adding two new sections to the platform: “Today In” and "News Video" in Facebook Watch.

Today In would be a section that features breaking news and updates from local publishers and organizations to keep users in-the-know about important news in their city.

News Video is a section they plan to add to Facebook Watch that will feature live coverage of daily news and other weekly news videos that would be exclusive to Watch.

Facebook hopes these new additions will keep users informed with high quality and trustworthy sources, free of #fakenews.