In this month’s column, we talk about the ongoing challenges of getting approved to publish via Facebook Instant Articles — many of which are caused by Facebook’s own plugin.
Like many publishers, we get a lot of traffic to MarketingLand.com and SearchEngineLand.com from Facebook. It’s our No. 1 social media referrer most months, but not all. And like many publishers, we’re interested in allowing Facebook users to enjoy our content through the Facebook Instant Articles service — that’s where Facebook hosts content for publishers and serves it up to readers in a fast, mobile-friendly setting while still allowing publishers to monetize their content.
We’re hopeful to have our content available soon via Instant Articles, but getting to this point has been… ironically… a slow, laborious process. In this month’s Editor’s Desk column, I’ve invited our VP of Technology, Michelle Robbins, to share some of what she’s gone through to get Marketing Land set up on Instant Articles. We hope it offers some help to any readers whose companies may be thinking about doing the same.
Here’s Michelle:
If WordPress is your CMS, and you’re keen to publish your content via Facebook’s Instant Articles program, there are some nuances to the implementation and review process that you’ll want to familiarize yourself with first.
The process itself is pretty straightforward:
- Sign up for Instant Articles.
- Install and configure the WordPress plugin.
- Submit your feed for review.
- Start publishing.
Note: For each feed review you submit, it’s three to five business days before you are notified of being approved/rejected. If it’s rejected, you have to fix the issue, resubmit your feed, and the clock starts over. In our experience, it was a solid five days each time we resubmitted.
The plugin (developed jointly between Facebook and WordPress/Automattic), though easy to install and configure, has proven not ready for prime time. You’ll want to familiarize yourself with both the Git repo and the current outstanding bugs/issues reported there.
Once you are accepted into the program by Facebook
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