Facebook Instant Articles: A Full Guide for Business Owners

 How to write  a Facebook Instant Articles: A Full Guide for Business Owners

 

   Okay what are Facebook instant articles and what do you need to know about them as a business owner well the reason Facebook users find them so ideal is because when you tap on a Facebook instant article as opposed to an article that leads to a regular external website the article Loads well instantly all right i think that's It am i done here oh no there's more oh just kidding everybody stick around there's more today we're talking about Facebook instant articles.

What is a Facebook instant article:

 The easiest way to explain them is to show you so take a look at my phone screen here let's look at my user experience of clicking on a regular article that links to another website one two three four five it takes like five seconds to fully load and then you can see it's still sort of loading things as i scroll along now let's look at an example of a Facebook instant article buzz feed is usually pretty good about using them and you can tell it's an instant article by the lightning bolt symbol on it as you can see there is zero load time it's already there and even as i scroll it's not lagging things are not slowly popping up it's Just all already there and that's because Facebook instant articles are native to the Facebook platform you're not sending your traffic elsewhere.

Facebook says that instant articles load over 4.8 or 4.9  times faster than mobile web across regions & devices meaning lower bounce rates and deeper engagement which is why over Thirty Seven thousand (37 000) pages on Facebook use instant articles other sources have said when compared with regular news feed  articles instant articles resulted in 20 more clicks 30 more shares and we're 70 less likely to be abandoned so that's the biggest point of using Facebook instant articles is that the load time is so much quicker and therefore the time users spend looking at your content is typically Longer but wait a second back up Facebook said over 37 000 pages use instant articles but there are over 60 million active business pages so what's the deal why are only such a small fraction of businesses using instant articles well there's actually a few reasons so with that let's go ahead,  and get into the pros & cons of Facebook instant articles.

We've already discussed the first two pros of quicker load time and extended time viewing your content so let's go ahead and round out the rest of the pro list and then we'll get into the cons the third pro is that you can make a little extra cash by monetizing your instant articles with ads this means you allow other people's ads to appear throughout your instant Article the fourth pro is greater reach on the Facebook platform and engagement remember earlier when we said instant articles gets 20 percent more clicks and thirty percent more shares means the friends of the person who share the article can see it too which just means more organic brand awareness for you Facebook goes even further than that twenty percent more clicks number by saying Facebook users Open 52 more articles when they're published As instant articles instead of a mobile web link plus videos can be set to auto play within instant articles.

Seamlessly and you can enable a 360 video to be rendered in your article which is where the reader can tilt their Phone and feel immersed into the video all of these things make for a great user Experience similar to what you find within an app thus increasing time on your article and engagement okay so now for the cons con number one and probably the biggest is that you're not sending traffic to your website you could probably cookie people to some degree by making an audience out of people who have engaged with your Facebook posts and Facebook ads manager but it's still not the same as having that traffic on your website that you own you can't leverage the traffic you get from Facebook instant articles on other platforms outside of Facebook and Instagram unless you get their contact Information which it is worth noting that Facebook does give you the option to include an email opt-in in your instant article for readers to submit their contact information to you.

I think Facebook was intentional about that because they knew losing the ability to track and retarget readers could be a big deterrent to business owners but there is still a gap of the people who just read your article without  submitting their contact info you won't be able to plug those people into other parts of your market in Funnel for con number two some would argue that you may receive a less than great reputation than if you just linked to your website because of all the ads instant articles released in 2016 and since then the ad usage within instant articles has increased quite a bit over the years people who are scrolling through may feel irritated they're just trying to read through your instant article and seeing all the irrelevant ads in between every other paragraph and they might associate that negative feeling with your brand they typically would run into less or no ads on your own website con number three is similar to the first two and it's that you don't get to nurture your readers as much when someone lands on your website.

 

They're in your world right you can create an environment of bendable content that is all strategically branded designed coded and laid out to your liking because it's your website you own it while instant articles do provide customizable layout features to make it look a little more branded for your Business it's not the same as sending people to your website where you have total Control and lastly con number four is extra time and manpower for some of Facebook's later updates the way instant articles work is that the article must first be published on your Website and then converted into an instant article there are some plugins you can use for certain websites like WordPress.

That make this easier but for at minimum quality Assurance you're still going to need to assign time and or labor to ensure everything transfers over smoothly so with all of those pros and cons i guess the question is are instant articles worth it while having content on your website seems to be the safer bet for a lot of businesses in terms of your overall marketing Funnel stats like the one we looked at earlier seem to point towards Facebook users engaging with instant articles better which is definitely something to note specifically for your Facebook Marketing.

My suggestion is if you do try it track everything for the first few weeks or months to determine if it's worth it based on what your specific business goals are if Facebook instant articles is something you're wanting to try you can head to this link on the screen here that I’ll also put in the Description and click sign up and it should take you to your Facebook creator studio so you do have to have a Facebook page in order to do this you can't just do it from a regular personal account once in creator studio it will give you prompts to follow to make sure your page  is eligible for monetization part of this process includes sending 10 production articles to Facebook to review as a sample of the kind of content you expect to publish on instant articles from there Facebook will review your work to see.

If you are eligible to publish instant articles quick question for you guys have any of you used instant articles and if so what's been your experience with them if not what's kept you from trying them out let me know in the comments I’m curious to Know that's all i have for today like this.