Facebook’s Instant articles are a pretty good way for publishers to connect with their audience. They are a feature broadly brought into use by news and content publishers however, the major issue with them lay in the fact that they were read only. So users could read the article sure, however, that was pretty much it. There was no way for the publishers to continue their association with the readers beyond the single article. Facebook is now stepping in and is adding call-to-action buttons to its Instant Articles.
As part of the Facebook Journalism Project, we’ve been in ongoing conversations with a number of publishers about opportunities to extend the business value of Instant Articles. Across the board, publishers want to have more direct lines of communication with their readers and drive the conversions that matter to their business.
The company has worked with various partners in a bid to create and test Page Like and Email Sign-Up call-to-action units. Faccebook is also testing a bunch of prompts that will let readers like a publisher’s page or sign up for an email newsletter from within an Instant Article. This should serve to ensure that the user has the option to directly engage with the publisher for a longer period of time right in front of his or her eyes.
Facebook had been working on introducing the program since over a year and in this period, has managed to roll out the program in beta to over 100 publishers across the world. Apparently, the beta has been successful and Facebook is now readying to roll the feature out to all of its publishers across the globe.
We’re excited to announce that next week we’ll be rolling out these call-to-action units to all publishers on Instant Articles. Publishers will be able to set these up through a simple, self-serve creation flow, and access insights on the performance of their call-to-action units.
Under this program, publishers can get their users to build lasting relationships through newsletters, page likes and so on. The feedback so far from the participants in the beta program has been pretty great and Facebook is now attempting to test free trial call-to-action unit along with Mobile app install call-to-action unit as well.
