You don’t have to be on Twitter to read what somebody tweets, and you don’t have to go to YouTube to view a YouTube video, thanks to the way this content can easily be embedded on other website. And now, you won’t need to go to Facebook to comment, click like, or otherwise interact with any Facebook posts.

In a move that’s designed to boost its relevance with breaking news and current events, Facebook has finally made public content more accessible, allowing news outlets to begin embedding posts for the first time.

Facebook says that the feature will eventually be rolled out to everyone, and is intended to let people embed public updates – for example photos, videos, hashtags and comments – from users, fan pages and groups and post them directly onto their own websites. The advantage of letting users embed posts is that these can then be interacted with, so readers of those sites would be able to click “like”, comment or share stores without actually having to go to Facebook.

To begin with, only a handful of websites will be able to do this. CNN, Mashable, the Huffington Post and People will all be able to embed Facebook posts onto their sites, though the social media network aims to roll out the feature more broadly “soon”.

Facebook software engineer Dave Capra states:

“Today, we are beginning to roll out Embedded Posts to make it possible for people to bring the most compelling, timely public posts from Facebook to the rest of the Web. Every day, public figures, journalists, and millions of regular people share their thoughts on what’s happening around the world on Facebook publicly.”

Twitter in the Crosshairs

For anyone who’s familiar with how Twitter’s embedded tweets work, this seems like an obvious move by Facebook to try and replicate its rivals success in the news cycle. Twitter is the platform of choice for thousands of celebrities and public officials, and as such is the source of numerous stories and rumours when these people post public updates. This is one of the main reasons why Twitter became so popular in the first place, simply because the entire site by its very nature is public, and it’s so easy to share its content across the interwebs. When a tweet is embedded onto any site, fellow twitterers can engage with them directly, and this in turn increases Twitter’s overall engagement.

But Facebook is a different beast from Twitter, and so whether or not this feature will work as well for it is open to question. The problem with Facebook is that unlike Twitter, posts aren’t set to be made public by default, hence the vast majority of its content remains hidden from non-friends and followers. Facebook almost never breaks news, but it does seem to be trying to change that. Recently it’s moved to get more celebrities on board with its verified program, while its recent inclusion of hashtags is another step in that direction.

Aside from this, Facebook has also made some slow but deliberate moves to make its network more public, making users profiles searchable by default and introducing an embed feature for Instagram.

For Facebook, this is all about growing its user base and relevance. It’s one thing to have the largest ‘closed’ social network in the world, but now it’s trying to muscle in on Twitter’s territory as the leading real-time network, pushing its content across the web and therefore increasing its global reach.