Facebook’s fast-loading, proprietary Instant Articles are a way for publishers to get readers within the social network. Adding up a new improvement to its Instant Articles feature, Facebook let’s publishers include call-to-action units in their articles to connect with readers, including those that encourage email sign-ups and Page Likes. These new tools increase the number of digital subscribers and to ease all the concerns threatening the media industry.
Recently “call-to-action” feature has been tested with the selected media outlets which participated in its Instant Articles program. Different tools embedded within stories prompt Facebook users to sign up for the publisher’s newsletters or to “like” their Facebook pages.
The email call-to-action unit helps readers share their email address directly with the publisher on Facebook, to receive the email newsletters or other email updates the publisher may offer.
An email sign-up with flexible design options
Taking some work out of the process of signing up for a publisher’s newsletters, this new option offers a one click sign up. Slate, which tried the call-to-action feature in beta, saw a growth of 41 percent in email newsletter in two months.
A “Page Like” call-to-action
This feature will help the viewers who likes the publishers page, to be eligible to receive posts and updates from that publisher in News Feed.
Promoting and encouraging their free trials of digital subscriptions to newspapers and to increase the downloads of their apps, Facebook is expanding those two features to all media outlets using Instant Articles. Giving media companies a direct relationship with the Facebook users has been the vital aim which could convert them into paying customers.
Media companies were worried that Facebook’s Instant Articles program started in 2015, might threaten their business to a huge extent. Facebook started hosting articles on its own website, to make audience reach its own website instead of sending them to the publishers site. This could help them to promote subscriptions and gather valuable data. There were some of the publishers who had cut back on instant articles as they were struggling to get profit from the program.
To know more about the concerns of the publishers many of which are shrinking and grappling the sales of print advertising and a digital ad landscape, Facebook executives went on a listening tour. Media companies aim to reach a larger audience while Facebook requires attractive and quality content to keep people coming back to the platform and to combat “fake news”.
These new improvements make Instant Articles more appealing to the publishers who would love to take benefit of the power of Facebook’s content distribution.
