Apart from catering to its users' networking and communication interests, Facebook is now planning to use its estimated 140 million users from the United States to help track missing children through emergency alerts on the mobile phones, the company said on Tuesday, according to Reuters.

Facebook, which is working in association with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, will soon be including something known as the "AMBER Alerts" in the news feeds of users.

The alerts, which are said to appear in the second slot of the feed will include the photograph of the missing child and other relevant details.

National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a non-profit organization established in 1984 by the US Congress in the wake of a series of child abductions, has ever since been a tool for educating the citizens on issues like child abduction, child sexual abuse, and child pornography.

AMBER Alerts have been a part of the US' child abduction alert system since 1996. AMBER, which stands for "America's Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response," was named after Amber Hageman, a 9-year-old, to commemorate her abduction and her subsequent killing in the year 1996.

Facebook makes these alerts shareable and thus makes the 200 alerts issued annually, to reach a wider audience.

Speaking on the effectiveness of the social media to spread a message, Emily Vacher, head of global safety and policy at Facebook, said, "When you see one of these messages on the billboard on the highway, it doesn't include a picture of the child," according to the Wall Street Journal.

However, the Amber Alerts despite going national, will send out alerts to the regions in and around the place of the abduction. Thus, any user, who logs in to Facebook in the vicinity of the abduction, gets an emergency alert on their mobiles.