Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Facebook have opened up Instant Articles to publishers of all sizes. In this post, we’ll guide you through the ins and outs of Facebook’s publishing platform and how to get started.

The announcement that Instant Articles were being opened up to all publishers came in February 2016, and they were officially opened for all on April 12, at Facebook’s F8 conference.

A Facebook-native publishing platform has been rumored since the social network changed its News Feed algorithm to favor “quality content” in 2013. Since that update, Facebook has become one of the top referrers of traffic to news sites and blogs of all sizes, and in the summer of 2015, traffic analytics company Parsely revealed that Facebook had even overtaken Google as the number 1 referrer of traffic to news sites....

Facebook has become “public enemy number one” for journalists, not to mention a “giant that may eat us.” And that’s just the Facebook business model of accumulating a massive global audience and then serving targeted ads to them in the news feed and videos—while controlling who sees what and deciding which content should be censored.

"It makes absolutely no sense to call out the platform for its errors without also trying to help make it better."

There’s also Facebook’s well-documented missteps with Trending Topics, hiring low-level editors in poor working conditions and then letting them go when the algorithm was “trained” to pick top stories. Then there’s its many run-ins over data collection. And the most recent black eye for Facebook came when it admitted flubbing video metrics on its platform. Facebook acknowledged in its advertiser support page last month that when it came to the “average duration of video viewed,” it had only been counting views that lasted three seconds or longer. This discrepancy between its stated definition of the average duration of the video viewed with its calculation in practice means that Facebook exaggerated its video views for close to two years.

Oops.

And yet, I remain optimistic that Facebook is far from public enemy number one for publishers, journalism or democracy. And it makes absolutely no sense to call out the platform for its errors without also trying to help make it better....