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For news junkies and those that like to stay on top of trending stories in Facebook, one of the big missing factors with the social network was the lack of knowing what was hot on the site. Are you missing out on some breaking new? Did you miss your window of opportunity to share a link with your snappy witty comment? We’ve been looking for something like this for years now, and Facebook is finally responding with “Trending”.

Officially announced yesterday, January 16th, Trending will be rolling out by Facebook to select countries and mobile over the course of the week, and will be displayed in the righthand corner of your newsfeed page.

Much like Twitter Trends, the list will include topics that have recently spiked in popularity on Facebook. Additionally, the topic headline will include a brief summary as to why the topic is trending. Clicking on the topic will bring you to a new page that includes relevant and popular posts from friends and pages surrounding that topic.

With Facebook recently taking a much stronger push toward highlighting news content in their users’ newsfeeds, this is the next logical step in helping to drive conversation and to inform audiences.

This newly available data, which early users have seen at the moment is trending more toward entertainment and fluffy content, is a great compliment to the already existing “Trending News on Facebook” stream via Bing.com.

News publishers and news-oriented Facebook pages can use both of these data sources to get (almost) real time insight into what topics are currently on the minds of Facebook users, and can react accordingly. That may mean simply sharing relevant content to gain some page exposure, or writing new content around these trends and then share those stories and let their readers share it as well.

As Facebook continues to place more emphasis and attention to news related content and status updates, we should continue to see improvements and deeper insight into what is trending on the social network.

[Source: Facebook Newsroom]

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