Facebook Instant Articles: What It Means for Your Content Marketing

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Facebook unveiled Instant Articles last week, a feature that enables publishers to create fast, interactive articles on Facebook.

Facebook Instant has two stated goals:

1. Reduce the time it takes to load an article in the Facebook mobile app
   
2. Create a more immersive reading experience within the mobile app

The results so far are impressive. Check out this side-by-side load time comparison, as well as the visual examples on Facebook’s announcement page.

So far, only a few major publishers have publicly announced they’ll give Instant Articles a try, though I predict that once they see even a glimmer of increased engagement, they’ll stick to it – with many more publishers to follow.

Instant Pages and your social strategy

So, how could Instant Articles change a brand’s social strategy? From what we can tell, there’s no big change in how brands should think about Facebook for now.

For starters, Facebook hasn’t indicated whether Instant Pages will be opened up to brand publishers. Right now, the only way to have an Instant Article published is by going through one of the beta publishing partners. For example, Universal Pictures ran a sponsored piece of content on BuzzFeed, which BuzzFeed then turned into an Instant Article on Facebook.

Setting the bar 

There is one notable impact that we could see in the not-too-distant future of Facebook Instant: improved quality of branded content.

With Instant Articles, Facebook is making a grab for even more of their audience’s precious little time and attention span. To quote this TechCrunch article, “Facebook never wants you to leave, so it’s swallowing up where you might try to go.”

Faster load times are certainly an important part of that effort. However, what’s even bigger is the way Facebook is enabling publishers to make their articles immersive and visually stunning. (Just look at this video by The Verge that shows Instant Articles’ capabilities.)

While brands may not think they need interactive maps and tilt-able videos, Facebook Instant allows those bells and whistles to actually be an option for every piece of content brands create.

Keeping up with quality 

Whether or not Facebook eventually opens up Instant Articles to brand publishers, the question that brands must ask themselves is this: “How can I create beautiful content at scale – without looking outdated and stale in comparison to Instant Articles?”

New features like Facebook’s prove that investing in the quality and exclusiveness of your branded content will only become more important. Otherwise, users will be less inclined to stay on your site and engage with your content.

I’ll spare you with a list of content best practices (they’re all on our blog), but here are a few takeaways about investing in your content:

• Leverage your brand’s authority to shape a clear voice and point of view.
  
• Ask experts (internal or otherwise) to fact check and review each and every piece of content.
  
• Incorporate visually-appealing formats such as video, infographics, cinemagraphs and photography. This is one of the most important (if not the most important) step to publishing multi-purpose, rich and highly shareable content.

In conclusion, I love that Facebook Instant Articles offers the ability for publishers to bring their stories to life. But if Facebook were to offer the feature to your brand tomorrow, would you be ready to do the same?

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