Facebook Instant Articles

Facebook is considered one of the most popular social media platforms that connect with other users, friends, and family. You can communicate and share information online with people all over the world through this social media platform.

Introduced in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, it is still the leading social media platforms with more than one billion users worldwide. Through Facebook, you can send messages, share images, videos or links, post a status update and even video call to stay in touch with your friends and family. 

With the rising popularity of social media marketing, Facebook started providing a marketing platform through its app. Facebook marketing allows brands and organizations to advertise their products and services through organic posts and highly paid targeted ads. 

Content Marketing is another exciting opportunity from Facebook that provides a platform for publishers to publish and promote their content. You can deliver your articles instantly to the target audience through Facebook instant articles. Content marketing is a strategy followed by many businesses that focus on creating and publishing content to a large number of targeted users to drive new traffic to the business.

Facebook marketing is the most common marketing practice these days, and Facebook instant articles is the new platform, followed by many companies as a part of their content marketing strategy. 

Facebook Instant Articles

Instant Articles is a feature of the most popular social media platform Facebook. This feature enables publishers for content-hosting directly on Facebook. The main motive behind creating this feature is to provide users with a better mobile experience.

When looked from a technical point of view, instant articles are just HTML documents that load very fast on Facebook.

Facebook collaborates with content publishers and allows them to publish their content on the app. When the publishers choose a topic for the instant article, it appears on the top of the Facebook page to those who browse the app on mobile.

Instant articles feature is specially designed for mobile app users. It is a mobile optimized feature, and all instant articles are mobile-optimized articles. They are customizable and can tell high-quality stories enabling Facebook to be a publishing platform.

Instant articles are lengthy articles and are similar to website articles. Users can read the entire article on the mobile app without leaving the app with this feature. The articles are strictly formatted in HTML format that assures articles are loaded faster and overall features provide better app performance.

Steps and Guidelines to create Instant Articles on Facebook 

1. Sign up for Facebook – The first step is to sign in to your Facebook account.

2. Choose your Facebook page – once you sign in to your Facebook account, choose a page you want to be used to activate your articles.

3. Claim your URL – Once your Facebook page is selected, you will have to provide a URL for your articles. This URL will be the basis of all the articles and posts you publish on your FB page. You need to add a meta tag to your HTML’S tag and add the URL to your settings to claim your URL. 

4. Create Articles – The best part of Instant articles feature is that, it enables you to publish your content directly to Facebook from your CMS. Facebook publishing tools like RSS feed or API can be used to sync your blog with instant articles. 

  • RSS Feed– an RSS feed is a simple way which helps you to connect your content with Facebook. RSS can easily integrate into your Facebook which automatically syndicates new posts into articles when you click on publish. To enable RSS feed to publish your content, you need to configure your content management system to a new RSS feed with full content of each article in instant articles mark up.
  • APPLICATION PROGRAMMING INTERFACE (API) – With API, you can create, publish, update or delete your instant articles directly from your CMS. It is an alternative for RSS. 

5. Customize your styling of articles – this feature enables you to customize your article’s look, the way you present it and change the feel of your entire article. You can choose the font style according to your preferences and also upload a logo of your choice. 

6. Submit for review – once you are completed with all the above steps. You need to submit your feed for review. Facebook reviews all the content and articles on your feed and checks if they are correctly formatted. The review time will generally be 24 to 48 hours after the submission. 

Advantages of Facebook Instant Articles 

  • Publishing Tools 

To enhance the reader’s experience, Facebook instant articles comes with a specialized set of publishing tools. Loading speed is another key advantage to instant articles, which helps the entire article to load faster. With this unique set of publishing tools, photos can now get tilt and pen effects that work best on mobiles with larger screens.

Publishers can also use kickers, layouts, typographic elements, and images to make the content appealing and match the web version. 

  • Control and Customization 

One of the most significant advantages of Facebook Instant Articles is that it gives the publisher full control over the article. The publisher has full control over the content and can customize the article’s look and feel according to their needs.

Although most of the elements of instant articles are controlled by Facebook itself, the content you publish can be formatted in the way you want to present it. For instance, photo galleries or any other content that is non-paragraphed can be customized when needed. 

  • Direct publishing from any CMS 

Any publisher can connect their content to Facebook through RSS feed. When the publish button is clicked, all the posts directly appear as Instant Articles. You can publish your articles as Facebook instant articles directly from your website through any Content Management Systems like Drupal, WordPress, etc.

Also, any real-time changes or edits made to the published article are directly reflected in the article. This can be considered as one of the amazing benefits of Facebook instant articles. 

  • Browsing Data and Analytics

Instant Articles allow you to track page activity and readership analytics and get data on engagement. This data lets you understand the article’s reach, the time spent by the readers to read the content of the article, scroll depth, and the number of users who engaged in the content or if any digital elements were used during readership. 

  • Monetization for publishers 

Facebook provides the opportunity for its publishers to sell ads through Facebook Audience Network. FB is the biggest social media platform, runs an exclusive ad network for targeted campaigns through FB ads.

With this opportunity, publishers can benefit from taking 100 per cent revenue generated from this ad. Although Facebook audience network is still in starting stages, it is quickly growing with passing time. 

  • Enhanced User Experience 

Facebook allows publishers to use images and videos, along with their content. With this feature, publishers can combine articles with media and enhance their presentation.

This feature allows the publishers to develop more engaging content ensuring enhanced experience for those using Facebook instant articles. 

Through Facebook promoting your content becomes easier and you can even have huge returns on your investment by proper planning and promotion. The key points to remember when you publish content on Facebook articles are as follows:

  • Target your audience
  • Share the post on your Facebook page.
  • Use catchy Headlines
  • Include images or videos
  • Boost up your Facebook post
  • Write a compelling Ad copy.
  • Make use of Custom Audience feature. 
  • Make use of emoji’s to make your ad copy interesting.
  • Create A/B tests for your ads to see what works best for your post.

Facebook is getting increasingly popular every day by a growing number of users due to its user-friendly nature, and no doubt even marketers mostly prefer Facebook due to its growth of audience network.

The most significant advantage of Facebook for marketers is that its highly specific audience targeting helps you reach the right audience.

Concluding Thoughts 

With the increasing demand for social media marketing, many marketers and business owners are busy finding new ways to market on social media. Facebook is considered one of the best platforms to promote any content because its cost-per-click price is very low compared to other channels.

The promotions are also easy to manage, and specific targeting option helps you reach the right people. Paid advertisement on Facebook expands your post’s reach. Another advantage of Facebook is it allows you to take 100 per cent revenue of your ads which is extremely beneficial.