Credit: Image by owenwbrown on Flickr. Some rights reserved
Just as news sites and blogs can embed a tweet or Instagram picture, public Facebook posts can now be embedded by copying a line of code and pasting it into a news story.
Five news sites can now embed public posts, with the Bleacher Report, CNN, Huffington Post, Mashable and PEOPLE piloting the scheme before a broader rollout.
Facebook announced the introduction of embedded posts late yesterday, explaining that posts are fully interactive and can be 'liked' and shared directly from the publisher's article. Similarly, embedded tweets, which Twitter introduced more than 18 months ago, allow retweets, follows and other interactions.
John Pavely, chief technology officer at the Huffington Post, has blogged and welcomed the development.
Stephen Hull, executive editor of Huffington Post UK, told Journalism.co.uk that the site will regularly embed Facebook posts, just as it embeds Instagram pictures and tweets on a regular basis.
Hull said embedding a Facebook post written by a star such as Serena Williams will work particularly well as it "will bring the story alive".
"Embeds are becoming a central feature of HuffPostUK's article pages," he explained.
"What's important for us and what should be important for all digital publishers is being part of the internet. We mustn't fall into the old school trap of hogging content and creating siloed sites."
"We are a platform for news and discussion, and our readers expect a transparent environment where content is drawn together to enable conversations. To that end, we see these embeds as a way of improving the experience for everyone."
Richard Moynihan, social media and community manager at Metro, which is not part of the US-focused pilot, described the introduction of Facebook embeds as "significant".
"It’s a logical but very significant step on Facebook’s part as they open up to the wider web," Moynihan told Journalism.co.uk.
"It should prove very useful to newsrooms for enriching stories but also embedding pictures without the need to host them, like with Instagram, so the owner retains more control."
Addition from CNN:
Lila King, senior director of social news at CNN Worldwide said embeddable posts "make covering newsworthy conversations on Facebook significantly more seamless for our digital editors".
"I believe embeddable posts will help circulate the conversation about CNN stories beyond our walls, but also bring it back to our site."
CNN yesterday embedded a Facebook poll about an op-ed on Bradley Manning. "The story began on CNN, the reaction happened on Facebook, and the embedded poll allowed us to connect the two," she explained.
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