Instant Articles Open to Every Publisher

Open to everyone since last Tuesday

Last Tuesday, at its developer conference, Facebook opened Instant Articles to any publisher with a Facebook page. Until then it had been limited to large news organisations and a selected group of others.

An Instant Article is a copy of one of your articles that Facebook stores and shows inside its own app on iPhones and Android phones.

When someone taps a link to it, the article appears almost at once, instead of your web page loading slowly in the browser built into the Facebook app.

Small publishers, and businesses that publish articles to win work, now face the question the large ones already answered: whether to hand Facebook a copy.

What readers get

Speed, above all. The article is stored on Facebook's servers in a simple format, so it is ready almost the moment the link is tapped.

Readers also get a clean, consistent layout: large photographs, video that plays in place, and none of the pop-ups or slow scripts many article pages carry.

On a computer, nothing changes. A link to the article from Facebook on a desktop still opens your own page.

What it asks of a publisher

• A Facebook page, through which Instant Articles are set up.
• The article on your own site first, at its usual address.
• A feed or plugin that sends each article to Facebook.
• A style template with your logo, fonts and colours.
• A sample batch of articles for Facebook to review.
• Someone to check each article arrives intact.

The last is the ongoing cost. Embeds, tables, galleries and forms do not always survive the conversion, and a broken article in Facebook's app carries your name, not Facebook's.

What a publisher hands over

Visits, first. A reader who opens an Instant Article stays inside Facebook. They see the article, but not your menu, your other articles, the sign-up box in your sidebar or anything else on your site.

Some control over design, second. The template allows a logo, fonts and colours, and little more, so every publisher's articles look broadly alike.

And some control over advertising. You can place ads you sell yourself, or fill the space through Facebook's own ad network and share the revenue, within its rules on where ads go and how many.

Under all three sits dependence. The terms, the template and the rules are Facebook's, and they change when Facebook decides.

Measuring what happens

Facebook reports how each Instant Article is read, and each article can carry your analytics code, so views also appear in your own reports.

They will not behave like ordinary visits. A reader who might once have browsed on to a second article on your site is now one tap from the next post in their news feed instead.

Decide before starting which figures matter, such as readers per article, newsletter sign-ups or enquiries. Then compare a month of articles published both ways.

Who it suits

It suits a publisher whose readers arrive mostly from Facebook on phones, who earns from the article itself rather than from what readers do next, and who publishes often enough to justify the setup.

It suits a business that publishes to win work far less. If an article's job is to bring readers to your site, a format built to keep them in Facebook works against it.

Check your own figures first. Analytics shows how many article visits come from Facebook, and how many of those are on phones.

A worked example

A market research firm with eight staff publishes a short weekly article drawn from its own research into shoppers in the region. Most readers find them through its Facebook page, nearly all on phones.

The articles do two different jobs. Most are short findings that keep the firm's name in front of retail marketers; a few each year introduce a full report the firm sells from its own site.

The firm set up Instant Articles last week, but its feed carries only the short findings. Articles introducing a report stay on the website, where the order form and the sign-up box are.

Its analytics code went into every article in the feed before anything was submitted, so readers inside Facebook's app will appear in the same reports as everyone else.

Previewing the sample batch on a phone turned up one problem: the tables of figures in two articles had not come through. Those findings now give the key numbers in a sentence as well as a chart.

In a month the firm will compare the two groups: how the short findings are read inside Facebook, and whether report sign-ups hold up on its own pages.

The setup, in outline

Setup starts from your Facebook page's publishing tools. You confirm the website is yours with a short line of code Facebook provides, design the template, and connect a feed of your articles.

WordPress sites can produce that feed with a plugin. Facebook then reviews a sample of articles before your Instant Articles go live, which can take several days.

After approval, new articles flow through automatically. Open each in the app for the first few weeks, since what looks right on the site may not arrive that way.

Alongside AMP

Google is chasing the same goal with Accelerated Mobile Pages, the pared-back article format it now shows in the Top stories carousel on phones.

Both exist because ordinary article pages are slow on phones, and both answer that with a simplified copy served from someone else's servers, with that platform's rules attached.

Neither fixes your own site. A fast mobile article page helps every reader from every source, and it is the sensible first step whatever you decide about either format.

The counter-case

For an ad-supported publisher with most of its readers on Facebook, Instant Articles may be clearly worth trying soon, since readers notice which articles load and which keep them waiting.

For a business that publishes once a month, the setup and checking may outweigh the benefit for now.

Either way, check where readers come from and what each article is for, fix your own pages first, then try the format on part of your output and compare.

Before you sign up

1. Check how many readers arrive from Facebook.
2. Check how many of those use phones.
3. Decide what each article is meant to achieve.
4. Speed up your own article pages first.
5. Try one type of article.
6. Open each one in the app.
7. Compare a month of both versions.

Step three settles most of the decision. An article written to be read can go wherever it is read fastest; an article written to bring someone to you needs to bring them to you.

Google's version of the same idea is covered in AMP pages now appear in Google's Top stories.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.