Facebook Begins Testing New “Stories To Share” Feature For Media Sites & Publishers

Facebook announced a new “Stories to Share” feature today, a tool that allows media sites to post suggested content on their Facebook page directly from the Insights Dashboard on the admin panel.

According to Facebook:

Stories to share makes it even easier for media sites to find the most engaging content they might want to post on Facebook. For instance, TIME can see suggestions of stories they have published to TIME.com but they have not yet shared to their Facebook fans.

Facebook says the “Stories to Share” feature is being tested by media sites and publishers, and not currently available on all Pages.

In the same announcement, Facebook claimed to have worked with 29 media sites over a seven-day period to determine if increasing the number of posts on a site’s Facebook page impacted its referral traffic.

The internal “experiment” discovered media sites that posted more frequently increased their referral traffic by over 80 percent:

Within that week, the media sites averaged an increase in the number of articles they posted to their pages by 57 percent. This resulted in an 89 percent increase in average outbound clicks to their domains.

Also, Facebook says an increase in post frequency resulted in a more than a 10 percent increase in Likes, and a 49 percent increase in the net number of fans per page.

Facebook offered further data to emphasize its impact on referral traffic, claiming TIME.com has experienced a 208 percent increase in referral traffic from Facebook during the last year, Buzzfeed an 855 percent gain, and Bleacher Report a 1,081 percent increase in referral traffic.