The Facebook instant article feature allows organizations to feature articles directly on Facebook instead of the old method which provided a link diverting the reader to the publisher’s website. While Facebook acts as one of the biggest platforms to divert traffic to the websites, this feature is certainly going to impact the content marketing methods substantially.
Earlier, content marketing focused mainly on the text, but with the introduction of this feature, the marketing team has to be more creative with the content. Graphics, pictures, and videos will now weigh almost equal to the words in a given story.
As the readers won’t be directly diverted to the particular website, now enterprises will have to come out with innovative ways to call visitors to their site once they are done reading the article. So, now conversion will not only mean converting visitors to leads but also converting readers to visitors.
One feature about the Facebook instant articles is that they load extraordinarily fast. By decreasing the amount of time the viewer spends in opening a particular story, there will be an increase in reading and sharing for sure. As Facebook has agreed to provide all the analytic data to the publishers of the story. This analytical data can be further used by marketers for conversion analysis taking note of what sort of data is being liked by people and by which section of people.
For enterprises that depend a great lot on this social media, it can come out to be positive for them if the marketing is done properly. That’s because Instant articles feature will call in more readers as the reader won’t have to move to another page for reading a story. This reading traffic can be lured by providing attractive content in these feature articles which would lead to maximized sharing and therefore branding. Publishers can also skilfully use the ad feature for marketing their content.
Even if Facebook stands out as an important platform for enterprises to reach its clients, it’s only one of the mediums. Facebook still does not have an extensive lot of content or web index. People will still look out for the search engines when they are looking for something specific according to their requirements.
Though Facebook certainly raises the bar for marketers, content websites, and web-hosting companies, it is difficult to predict how much it will have a direct impact on the content of the websites except the traffic generation part which Facebook facilitated, which again can be tackled by generating content compatible with the Instant article feature.
