What to Think About Facebook’s Instant Articles
A lot of the buzz surrounding Facebook as of late is the launch of Facebook Instant Articles. This mobile-only platform is effectively raising the bar for content publishers by enabling you to create an incredibly rich, multi-layered approach to content that will amaze and engage.
Facebook Instant Articles are a new platform for publishing content on Facebook that load much faster than normal articles on Facebook, offer several multimedia enhancements that make this more of an experience than an article, and ultimately give the publisher far more control than they had previously.
But what can it do for me you ask? Well at the moment, it’s in a testing mode with only 9 publishers as part of the trial. (The New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed, NBC, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC News, Spiegel and Bild) Facebook wants to eventually roll this out to anyone who wants to share stories, but that is not available at this time.
Some of the cool features of Facebook Instant Articles
- Want to put in embedded tweets, YouTube videos, photos, image galleries, videos and interactive graphics directly into the posts? Not a problem! They will even start directly up, increasing time on site and engagement.
- Need more detail? You can use the handy zoom feature to have a closer look into videos, images and maps.
- Like what you see? You can Like or comment on pages directly inside the app!
- Publish your own logos and Facebook Fan page follow buttons within the story.
- Need more stats? Your Google Analytics integrate nicely with the articles.
Although Facebook Instant Articles are only in Beta mode now, Facebook wants to eventually roll this out to anyone who wants to share stories on Facebook. Facebook is allowing publishers who post sponsored content (like Buzzfeed) to have that content shared. (About the only way anyone not associated with the aforementioned 9 publishers can get their own content on there at the moment)
The look and feel of Facebook Instant Articles will mark a raising of the bar with regards to publishing content on the web, particularly the mobile web. Once people have seen the amazing versatility and engagement achievable with this platform, you’ll have a tough time getting them to settle for anything less.