Published April 1, 2020
The Facebook Local Alerts Tool is now available to the following Facebook Pages in communities across the country responding to COVID-19:
- At City and County Level: primary government page (“City of …” / “County of …”), law enforcement and emergency responder pages, and public health agency pages
- At State Level: public health agency pages, law enforcement and emergency responder pages
(Note: the tool is not available to elected officials or public figures, only government organizations listed above)
Local Alerts is a free tool that allows local government, public health agency, and first responder Facebook Pages to broadcast essential updates to people in their community via Facebook by marking a page post as “Local Alert,” which sends out a notification to page followers who live in a community. Learn more here.
If you don’t already have access, you should find instructions on how to sign up in an email that was sent to your Facebook Page admins. We (Facebook) recommend doing this as soon as you can to ensure you have full ability to send Local Alerts when you need them. If you did not receive an email, please complete this form.
Facebook has also launched the COVID-19 Information Center, featured at the top of News Feed, to provide a central place for people to get the latest news and information as well as resources and tips to stay healthy and support their family and community. We are now also sharing Local Alerts to the top of the Information Center- giving them additional distribution.
We encourage you to share this information with any eligible government pages you think would be interested.
Also, to make it easy to monitor some of the most shared content on social media about the virus in every state, we created a state-level CrowdTangle Live Displays. These displays are publicly accessible — please feel free to use and share.