In the world where content is reportedly generating tractions for businesses across the globe, the social networking giant, Facebook, has introduced an interactive content uploading feature for the content marketers and publishers. This feature is introduced for those people who are more interested in instant news feeds and updates available online. The Instant Articles feature being deployed with HTML5 functionality, opens faster on your smartphone and generates a customised visual display. This unique Facebook feature has started receiving appreciation from publishers who are heavily reliant on content for their sustainability and growth.

The Instant Articles platform is accessible to all those publishers who are willing to capitalise this feature for the benefit of their brand. Some striking statistics were later on revealed by the Facebook team post testing the applicability of this feature. According to the statistical data, Instant Articles are read more often than regular articles by 20% and are shared more often than the traditional ones by 30%. The retention also increases by 70%

Instant Articles are created with HTML5 that makes it highly interactive and visually appealing for the audience. Apart from providing an engaging mobile experience, Instant Articles feature audio captions, autoplay video and interactive maps. HTML 5 provides the necessary facilities within an Instant article, and the format is highly useful in inserting ads, analytics, and social media embeds.

Content can be published directly from the Content Management System such as WordPress. It promises a game-changing mobile reading experience for the audience. They have a slight difference in layout and design, allowing the businesses to post as much content as they want on Facebook. It also helps the article to be published directly through the Content Management System of publishers. Their CMS needs to be appropriately configured to generate an RSS feed for every content piece. Each RSS feed consists of a brief or full text along with the metadata. The next step involves publishers providing the RSS feed of their content to Facebook, and once this feed is established correctly, Instant Articles start uploading content automatically from the publisher’s website. Any moderation in content can be captured by Instant Articles automatically through the RSS feed.

Publishers need to check regularly the RSS configuration screen for any error in the feed so that it can be resolved immediately.

There are some third-party publishing tools supported by Facebook WordPress, Drupal that distribute content from websites and mobile apps to Facebook’s Instant Articles. After activating the plugins, the publisher gets a new menu for bridging with their Facebook page in order to upload the content. In the edit page, the status of each submission can be viewed.

What if you are not using WordPress or any Facebook-supported CMS?

In this case, Instant Articles API helps you in uploading the content on Instant Articles. The application of UPI lets the content to be created, published, uploaded and deleted directly through any CMS. For using Instant Articles API, publishers need to have a Facebook App ID, and then they can create and update content directly from the existing CMS. Facebook plans to broaden the reach of Instant Articles to more number of readers using the Facebook app on iPhone. This feature is also launched for Android and is already making news of the market. At the time of distributing the content to Instant Articles, the publishers need to ensure its visibility to all Facebook crawlers.