Democratizing Publishing: What Facebook’s Instant Articles Means for Publishers

In early April, Facebook announced that Instant Articles, a publishing service that allows users to view content directly without leaving the Facebook app or site, would now be available to every publisher in the world after a year-long pilot with select publishers.

The announcement reinforced a point that’s become increasingly evident in recent months: Facebook is fast transforming from a social network you visit for a few minutes each day into a place you never need to leave. With its growing mobile presence and features such as Facebook Live, the company’s objective is to create an all-inclusive social universe.

With 63 percent of users saying they use their Facebook feed as a news source, it’s clear that the platform has gone beyond an amalgamation of cat videos, vacation updates, and baby photos to a place where people engage seriously with each other and the world.

By removing any need for a user to leave Facebook, the new service offers a faster and easier alternative to reading and viewing content online. Links take an average of 8 seconds to load, according to Facebook, which is a key reason users frequently ignore traditional News Feed articles. Facebook claims that Instant Articles will make users 70 percent less likely to abandon the pages they click on due to slow load times.

Housing all published content under the Facebook umbrella is clearly good for Facebook – the more time users spend poking around there, the easier life gets for the social media juggernaut’s ad sales team. But what about publishers? How can Instant Articles compensate for the loss of traffic their own websites are sure to sustain?

The answer is simple: Publishers that create great content will be rewarded. While Instant Articles won’t receive preferential treatment from Facebook’s News Feed sorting algorithm, articles that attract higher engagement in the form of reactions, comments, and shares will appear higher and more frequently on the feed. By rewarding engagement, Instant Articles can create a level playing field and give smaller publications a chance to attract an outsized audience.

Consider the case of Libération, a French daily newspaper devoted to politics and opinion. The medium-sized publication quickly saw an increase in revenue, interaction, and audience retention when it used Instant Articles to share its 150 daily pieces of content over a two-month trial period, according to H+K Strategies Community Manager Mireia Galindo. The total time users spent on articles increased by 33 percent, and Libération’s Facebook follower count increased 10 percent.

There are other sweeteners for publishers, too. Facebook is offering them the chance to sell advertising within their articles and keep all the revenue they generate from those ads. Publishers also have the option of using Facebook’s Audience Network tool, which provides a cocktail of useful analytics tools to track and measure the success of ad campaigns. They’d be able to sell any ad space they don’t use and retain 70 percent of the revenue.

Publishers will also retain the ability to track their content in the ways to which they are accustomed. Instant Articles is compatible with audience measurement and attribution tools such as comScore, Omniture, and Google Analytics.

Publishers won’t have to give up their unique, carefully honed design aesthetics either. Instant Articles will parse HTML and RSS display articles with fonts, layouts, and formats that make the articles feel more personalized to the publisher. The service also allows publishers to include interactive content such as zoomable high-resolution photos, videos that auto-play as you scroll on the page, interactive maps, and embedded audio.

Instant Articles also enhances audience interactivity using an innovative new comment system, in which users will be able to leave comments, notes, and questions on various segments of posted articles, just as they can on the blogging platform Medium or the annotatable lyrics site Genius. Publishers can also offer subscriptions and collect paragraph-by-paragraph data on users’ reading habits.

Ultimately, the democratization of publishing through Instant Articles marks the beginning of a new chapter in digital content creation, in which native experiences are curated and supported by both the creator and the platform.

For now, this is a win-win opportunity for everyone involved: better ad revenue for Facebook as more publishers adopt the platform, a better user experience for the consumer, and added reach for publishers (large or small), without the need to adopt new measurement tools. In its continued effort to host the world’s content directly on its platform, Facebook is giving publishers and consumers an environment where content quality and engagement are the guiding metrics for performance.

posted by Magnify Team | July 27, 2016@
http://www.hkstrategies.com/instant-articles-for-publishers/

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Democratizing Publishing: What Facebook’s Instant Articles Means for Publishers
Democratizing Publishing: What Facebook’s Instant Articles Means for Publishers

Democratizing Publishing: What Facebook’s Instant Articles Means for Publishers
Democratizing Publishing: What Facebook’s Instant Articles Means for Publishers

Democratizing Publishing: What Facebook’s Instant Articles Means for Publishers