Facebook offers new tool to help people find COVID-19 vaccine locations and make appointments
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced this morning that Facebook is committed to helping vaccinate 50 million people against COVID-19:
- Find vaccines and make appointments on Facebook: To help find where and when you can get a COVID-19 vaccine, Facebook is partnering with Boston Children’s Hospital to launch a Vaccine Finder tool that helps users find nearby locations that offer the vaccine. Starting today, users can search for vaccine locations and make an appointment directly from their News Feeds. In the coming weeks, users will also be able to see whether the locations nearest to them have vaccines available.
- Promoting reliable COVID vaccine information: Additional steps to promote reliable information about the COVID-19 vaccine are being implemented.
- Vaccine trends: Provide public officials with real-time aggregate trends in COVID-19 vaccinations, intent to get vaccinated, and reasons for hesitancy to inform equitable vaccine rollout.
- Partner credits: Providing partners with enough ad credits to reach nearly everyone on Facebook and Instagram with critical messaging on COVID-19.
- Crowdtangle Display: Facebook is also making it easy to track how COVID-19 vaccine information is being spread on social media through CrowdTangle’s COVID-19 Live Displays. Publishers, global aid organizations, journalists and others can access real-time, global streams of vaccine-related posts on Facebook, Instagram and Reddit in 34 languages.
Facebook is promoting these tools to Bay Area residents and Californians according to vaccine eligibility, including age, occupation, and location based on the user’s profile information. As vaccine eligibility expands, these products will be promoted to more and more people.
