Facebook has been piloting Instant Articles with a few hundred publishers since May 2015 but now plans to roll the feature out to all publishers and Pages this April.
Described as an “incredibly fast and immersive reading experience for people on Facebook”, Instant Articles have a number of advantages for publishers (and that includes you if you have articles on your website) because it gives full control over the look of articles and 100% of revenue generation from the ads served by your own direct-sold ads (albeit with certain limitations – at least 350 words between ads and a content/ads ratio of 85%/15%). Publishers can also measure activity through their existing analytics software. Of course what this means in reality is that users effectively stay on the Facebook platform, and Facebook ramps up it’s perception as a news portal.
Google is expected to launch its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) later this month. Whilst not really competing, this will result in publishers benefiting from faster page load speeds off Facebook thanks to AMP and Instant Articles for Facebook referral traffic.
So whilst Instant Articles are great for users with load times up to 10 times faster than traditional links as well as a host of other benefits, they are also a big opportunity for brands following content marketing principles. However, this all comes with a few caveats; the Instant Articles format can remove links that connect users to other posts by the same publisher – often those links help monetise content. Furthermore you lose all site nav and any calls-to-action (such as lead gen pop-ups and the like). And of course it hands yet more power to the Facebook algorithm (or sponsored results).
Instant Articles were initially rolled out on iOS and have been available on Android since December 2015. They are easily identified by the small lightening icon in the upper right corner, highlighted on this image:
Developers can find out more about Instant Articles here. This will help you prepare to hit the ground running when the program is opened up to all publishers on 12 April.
Brand Pages can register their interest in getting Instant Article access here (click down to Contact Us and complete the form).
And those using WordPress will be delighted to hear that the PageFrog plugin converts your blog posts to Instant Articles format (and, optionally, Google AMP format).
We’ll be following developments closely and will post some further how-to guidelines once the program fully opens.