CONTENT STUDIO

Facebook launched Instant Articles a while back, and received mixed comments from publishers and brands. However the reach of Facebook is enormous, and has lured many major publishers and businesses to sign up for Instant Articles. If you are still wondering what Instant Articles is, and whether it is right for your business, then read along.

Instant Articles is a mobile publishing format that enables news publishers to distribute articles to Facebook’s app that load and display faster than the standard mobile web. Instant Articles tries to provide an immersive and interactive reading experience to its users, while making it easy with super fast loading speed through the Facebook app.

Here are 10 reasons we think it’s good:

• Loading time is 10 times faster.

Most content go unseen if viewers have to wait for them to load on their smartphones. This is especially true for emerging markets such as Asia and Africa. In this day and age, viewers respond better to timeliness and speed, anything that requires them to stare at the loading circle, their thumbs will move to the “X” button.

• Seamless integration with the news feed

To make the sharing process as seamless and consistent as possible, Facebook connects each Instant article to the URL where the original version is being hosted. When a publisher will share a link in individual’s News Feeds, Facebook checks if an Instant Article is available for that URL. If yes, users see the associated Instant Article. Otherwise, the link simply opens up in the mobile web browser. If this doesn’t make the entire reading and sharing process a breeze, we don’t know what else does!

• Autoplay videos

If you notice videos in your news feed that play automatically in the background, that’s the autoplay feature at work. This is a cool way to attract more views and catch people’s attention while they are browsing their Facebook feed, making them more likely to see content that they would otherwise skip through.

• Support for rich media elements

Instant Articles has introduced a number of features to give their users an incredible experience with embedded audio captions, auto-play videos, interactive maps and vivid high-resolution photos, tilt and zoom capabilities etc.

• Automate the publishing of articles on facebook with secure RSS

Instant Articles support syndication using a secure RSS feed. This feed can integrate seamlessly with your existing workflow if new stories are automatically syndicated as Instant Articles whenever you publish them from your regular content management system.

• Publisher in control

Facebook allows publishers to sell ads in their Instant articles and keep 100% of the revenue. Also, one can take advantage of the Facebook Audience Network to monetize your content but in this case, they’ll get only 70% of the ad revenue. The rest will be kept by Facebook as its standard 30% cut.

• Mirror the look of your brand

Instant Articles gives publishers full control over how the stories fit into the platform. Not only can you customize your stories to match your brand identity, but you can even customize Facebook Like and Comment buttons. In essence, Instant Articles are designed to help publishers achieve a more unique and personalized look and feel for their stories on Facebook.

• Encourages site visits, growing the brand

Instant Articles are only available on Facebook’s mobile app. However, by having a standard web URL that links to a web-based version of the content, on the brand/business’s site, ensures that shared links to Instant Articles discovered on Facebook remain accessible to any reader on any platform.

• Measurable and trackable

You could easily get a sense of how people read and engage with your Instant Articles through data from Facebook, as well as from other third-party analytical tools and services.

1. Earn traffic credit through attribution providers.
2. Analyze real-time article traffic with your existing web analytics tools.
3. Embed cookies to follow reader’s interests and serve more relevant ads.

• Various content choices

There are many types of content one could choose to publish on Instant Articles such as links, photo galleries, polls, and other types of media — and how much of it to post.