Instant Articles are here, they’ve been around for 12 months now but only a select few publishers were given access. You may have seen the small lightning bolt in the top right corner of some news items on Facebook, these open a Facebook hosted article, instantly.
They look great, they are 10 times faster to load than going to a website link and they tell the story with images as well as video; so let’s all have them for our business page! Hold on, not quite so fast!
Facebook instant articles are hosted on Facebook, this allows a user to view an article without leaving the app, seamless link back and forth for a perfect user experience but a not so great experience for the marketer.
The issue with instant articles is just that, they are hosted on Facebook, the whole point of a blog for many businesses is to drive traffic to your site and hopefully towards an enquiry or sale of your product or service.
When you make a deal with the devil, we mean Facebook you give up control of your article, how it looks, the navigation and audience. In giving up control we lose the ability to drive traffic to our website, instead our audience is quietly prompted to like our page and maybe read our other articles.
For a publisher these instant articles are great but for marketing your business, not so great, not yet anyway as we’re sure it will change over the coming months.
Here is an image of one of our blog posts as an Instant Article, not much is different until you click and open the article. Like we said it looks great and is seamless to navigate but not so great in gathering traffic to your site, we won’t be publishing much through Instant Articles just yet.
If you would like to find out more on Instant Articles and maybe even try them out by linking them to your blog just go to your business page and look for the publishing tools.
Social Media Management is a service Red Squirrel Marketing offer, let us know if we can help you to grow on Social Media. info@nutsaboutmarketing.com