Facebook Gives Publishers New Tools, Hopes They’ll Use Them to Give Facebook More Stuff

By: Peter Kafka | re/code

Facebook has been courting content companies for years because it wants content companies to bring more of their content to Facebook. Here’s a new example: A set of tools that will make it easier for publishers to share their stuff with the social network’s 1.3 billion users.

Most of these tools are fairly straightforward, like a new analytics dashboard that provides more detailed information about the way stories perform on the site. A new “smart publishing” option is a little more interesting, because it lets Facebook — with pre-approval from publishers — automatically push out stories that are hot on the site, even if a publisher hasn’t shared them on Facebook itself.