Facebook Instant Articles for the media
Find out how they can impact your traffic and revenues.
What are FIA?
Hello! What's going on?
Now that the summer season is coming and obviously less content is generated, it is a good time to reflect on how user timelines on social networks help you to maintain the metrics of your media, thanks to the traffic they generate. In this sense, it may be of interest to explain the usefulness of FIAs, Facebook Instant Articles, the native service that Facebook makes available to publishers to serve content to mobile devices. Users can consume and share your publications, in many cases making them viral, all without leaving their walls.
If you improve the user experience, and the efficiency of download times, with optimized and more attractive content, you increase the loyalty of users to your Facebook page and thus increase the number of social interactions with your publications, for a more segmented audience and consequently you can also improve advertising revenue from all the potential readers that you can find on the social network.
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Why did FIA emerge?
The war between the major technology providers such as Google and Facebook to win the game of media news and more specifically from the mobile. It arose before 2016, when Google bet on AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) and Facebook on Instant Articles, but the release of Google AMP in February 2016, caused the rest of the players to wake up to offer their solutions and not give up the technological game.
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Both technologies (FIA and AMP) have been quite successful, although AMP has always been at the forefront and has generated better traffic volumes, FIA has gone through quite bad times, where publishers stopped using this Facebook service.
How do FIAs work?
AIFs are displayed like any other post on your wall and those of users who have previously interacted with your page. The loading of the content is almost instantaneous and they can also include high resolution images and video. It is easy to identify them, because in the upper right part they show the symbol of a lightning bolt and therefore they are not confused with a sponsored content or an advertisement within the timeline. Users can interact with them and of course share them easily.
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In addition, FIAs allow you to include a call to action within the content itself, to get readers to leave you their email and you can create lists of subscribers, as Facebook provides you with the rest of the data already available to the user.
In principle, Facebook prioritizes these articles over other content that is not optimized, with its policy of improving the user experience within its App. Please note that FIA content only works within the Facebook App.
How can I publish Facebook Instant Articles?
You just need to have created a Facebook page and activate Instant Articles using the following form where you will've to be logged in as a user with one or more Facebook pages. Once you have done this, in the settings of your Facebook page, you can adjust the details of this technology, following the many manuals and guides that Facebook puts at your disposal.
Remember that Comitium, the CMS specialized in digital newspapers, integrates this technology and at BAB we can configure it for your media, to automatically publish your content in FIA. In addition, you can decide which articles you want to be sent to FIA and which not. Ask us if you are interested in using Facebook FIAs.
Are FIAs profitable for your publishing company?
If we take into account that FIAs can deliver your content to thousands of potential users within the network, this service can undoubtedly improve your audience, but it also increases your dependence on Facebook.
With FIA you have the right to include your advertising (whatever it is) obtaining the benefits that already correspond to you, without sharing them with Facebook. Even so, if you use Facebook advertising in your FIA content, you will obviously share the revenue with Facebook, but in the same way as if you put Facebook advertising within your website. In short, advertising included in FIA content does not imply reducing your profit margin.
What is the impact on metrics?
You can and should use analytics codes (Comscore, Google Analytics...) to record the traffic generated by your content with FIA. In addition, it will be good to include in the Analytics code a specific channel, in order to know the traffic contribution using FIA and thus, to be able to decide if it generates enough value or not.
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