Not so long ago Facebook announced the instant articles. Since then there has been a lot of hype around this feature and many websites already started adopting to it. With the instant articles features the web masters can now publish any type of article, from daily news to long form features. It can be integrated seamlessly with your current workflow and existing production tools.
According to the recent study, Facebook instant articles are shared 30% more as compared to traditional web pages. As it loads 10x times faster, it also drives more clicks. Initially for a limited period, Facebook released this feature for few allowed publishers. Now from April 2016 it open to all publishers.
How Facebook Instant Articles Work?
The first thing you need for instant article to work on your Website is to have an Facebook Page. When a publisher shares an article onto Facebook, it will generate an instant article optimized version rather than a mobile web version. This can be managed from publisher Facebook page. Publishers can also get paid from the ad revenue generated by selling the ad space within Instance articles.
To get started with Facebook instant articles, here are a few steps you need to follow:
1. Signup for Instant Articles program
First you need to signup for the program at Instant Articles. You will be asked to select your Facebook page for which you want to activate this service.
2. Claim Your URL
Once you signed up, you will be redirected to your Facebook page. Now claim a URL that you would like to use for publishing articles. Before claim your website’s URL, add the following meta tag to your website’s <head> tag in the HTML and then click “Claim URL” button.
<meta property="fb:pages" content="22885084343345" />
If your claim is successful, you will notice as following.
3. Connect your RSS feed
You can synchronize your blog with Facebook instant articles via API or an RSS feed. Provide your RSS feed URL and save. Make sure your RSS feed is valid and error free.
Integrate Facebook Instant Articles to WordPress Blog
Facebook has partnered with different CMS vendors including WordPress, Drupal for helping publisher for seamless integration of their website to instant articles. If you’re a WordPress user, you can download and install the official Instant Articles for WP plugin for WordPress plugin directory. Once plugin is activated,
Provide your Facebook App ID and App Secret to start using the plugin. If you don’t have an Facebook app setup already, you can create a new app.
After you provide your Facebook app id, you will be asked to login to Facebook and authorize your page. Once the authorization is complete your setup is almost ready.
Note, Although you use the WordPress plugin, the signup for the Instant article as described above is need to be completed to get the plugin to work.
4. Publish Articles for Review
Once you complete the above configuration, you need to submit at least 10 articles for review. For that, you can open previously published WordPress post in edit mode and save them and send those to Facebook instant articles RSS feed.
This would send the articles for review. It takes 3-4 days to get them approved. Once approved, you can publish the articles automatically. You can enable auto-publishing from the auto feed and you’re done.
