5 Fast Facts About Facebook Instant Articles
A lot has been said about Facebook Instant Articles, and there has been a debate over its use. Some say it isn’t worth it, as they argue that these Instant Articles could hurt the SEO of any site.
Since there will be no backlinks to your website, traffic and conversions may naturally go down. People aren’t being led to your blog because the articles are readily available within the Facebook app, thereby eliminating the need for the users to be redirected to the actual content source.
Of course, that is a valid point of view, as Facebook Instant Articles could potentially backlash on some of your online business marketing strategies. However, many companies have managed to take advantage of this nifty feature. Bloggers and publications, big or small, have embraced Instant Articles — and for very good reasons.
Here are five facts about Facebook Instant Articles that might just open your eyes to its potential.
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Instant Articles guarantees faster loading speed.
Facebook Instant Articles load ten times faster than mobile web articles, and this means a lower bounce rate and more clicks. A person’s average attention span is only eight seconds, so if your article takes up a lot of time to load, users will simply abandon it. That’s why speed is very important when it comes to engaging with your audience.
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You have supreme control over what you publish.
Signing up for Instant Articles doesn’t mean that you will be forced to churn out one article after the other. That’s totally not the case as you have 100% control over what to publish. Moreover, you can also keep track of the articles that are performing well and base your strategy on the data you’ll gather. This kind of insight will surely be useful with social media management as well.
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You can add email signup forms to the articles.
Instant Articles allows you to integrate email signup forms to the articles. This is very helpful for capturing more data about your audience on Facebook. Furthermore, this will help you shape your content marketing strategy to suit the needs of your readers.
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Monetization is possible with Instant Articles.
There are two ways in which you could make money out of Facebook Instant Articles. The first one is by selling your own ads; this lets you keep all of the revenue. The second one is through Facebook’s Audience Network wherein Facebook takes a 30% cut. Explore these options and see how each monetization method works for you.
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Instant Articles can be connected to an analytics platform.
Facebook can be connected to different analytics platforms including Google Analytics, Parse.ly, Chartbeat, and more. By integrating Instant Articles to any of these platforms, you can get various types of data like the number of clicks an Instant Article is getting, the time spent by readers on every article, and how much of your content has been read (also referred to as “scroll depth”).
These are just five of the awesome benefits that Facebook Instant Articles can give you. Basically, this feature enables you to capture a lot of crucial data that you and your virtual assistant could use to boost your brand’s presence online and increase conversions.