What is Facebook Instant Articles?
Facebook Instant Articles is a new mobile publishing format based on the HTML 5 specification and a great tactic to use in your Social Media Marketing strategy. Facebook Articles aim to improve the user experience when reading articles from within the Facebook App. The new technology is primarily aimed at blog publishers and news sites.
Why should I consider using Facebook Instant Articles?
Facebook Instant Articles can increase the speed of your page load by more than 50%. Users hate to wait and anything you can do to improve the load time of your pages increases the user experience, readership and ultimately user satisfaction. Facebook Instant Articles also allows for the use of analytics and advertising platforms like Google AdSense, so you can still measure and monetize your content. Large blogs and news sites like CNN and National Geographic are using this technology to engage their users and increase the readership of their blog and now small businesses have the opportunity to leverage the same technology. Google is also adopting a format called AMP which stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. The standards is different, but the goal is the same as Facebook Instant Articles. We will cover AMP pages in a future post.
How hard is it to implement Facebook Instant Articles?
It really depends on the approach you take. If you use WordPress you can find a plugin to help get you started faster. If you are a developer or have some coding experience you may be able to use the Facebook Instant Articles developer page to add the markup to your web pages.
Facebook Instant Articles & Google AMP Pages by PageFrog
The PageFrog plugin allows you to easily publish and manage your content directly from WordPress to Facebook Instant Articles (FBIA) and Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) with full support for ads and analytics.
Where can I find an overview of Facebook Instant Articles?
We’ve put together a brief video to educate you on Facebook Instant Articles and point you towards some helpful resources. You can share this page with your colleagues on social media and also find this presentation posted on Slideshare.
Where can I go for help?
If you are working with a digital marketing agency you can ask them to implement Facebook Instant Articles on your blog. If you don’t have an agency or don’t have the time to do the work, you can hire a company like Biondo Creative to help you implement Facebook Instant Articles.