As more people turn to the internet as their primary source for news and information, content has become more important than ever for driving traffic and keeping visitors interested. Realizing that cat pictures are no longer the future of the internet, Facebook will soon expand access its new content publishing tool. Once available to a few select publishers, Facebook will open up its Instant Articles feature to everyone in April.
The social media giant made the announcement yesterday as part of its annual F8 developers conference. The move creates tremendous opportunities for content publishers, as it increases the size of their potential audience and creates opportunities for more ad revenue.
“We’re excited to announce that on April 12th at Facebook’s F8 conference, we will be opening up the Instant Articles program to all publishers—of any size, anywhere in the world,” the company wrote in statement. “To date, we’ve been working with a few hundred publishers around the world to build an incredibly fast and immersive reading experience for people on Facebook. While we were getting feedback and making improvements to Instant Articles, in parallel we’ve been building the tools to open up Instant Articles more broadly.”
There are multiple benefits to taking advantage of Instant Articles. The main benefits are for mobile users who will be able to get articles fasters. Going from Facebook to an article on an external site is a long and somewhat annoying process. This is something that Facebook acknowledged.
“Slow loading times on the mobile web created a problematic experience for people reading news on their phones,” they wrote in the release.
Facebook has taken tremendous effort to make the new feature inviting to publishers. Instant Articles benefits the publisher with direct-sold ads that enable them to keep 100 percent of their revenue. The all get the opportunity to view Facebook or third-party analytics on article performance. Plus, Facebook enables publishers to further monetize their content using the Facebook Audience Network.
Publishers can do all this while accessing a rich suite of multimedia tools to create dynamic, interactive stories, that will load quickly everywhere on Facebook, regardless of where in the world their readers are.
Facebook assures publishers that the new system will be easy to use .They say that Instant Articles uses the languages of the web and will work with publishers’ content management systems. But with implementation day quickly approaching, Facebook encourage all interested publishers to review our documentation and prepare for open availability in April, at which point they will be able to share this fast, interactive experience with their readers.
This new move by Facebook can make a huge difference in the future of social media and content marketing . Content publishers should definitely consider using the new feature once it becomes available.
For more news about Facebook, read this recent article.