Facebook has opened up Instant Articles to publishers of all sizes. 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.
Instant Articles received 20% more clicks than mobile web articles from the News Feed.
Facebook also discovered that people on slower connections read 20-40% more Instant Articles than mobile web articles on average.
How to create Instant Articles on Facebook
Step 1: Sign up
The first thing you need to do to get up and running is sign up to join the program. You can do this at instantarticles.fb.com.
Step 2: Choose your Facebook Page
After signing up you’ll be given the chance to choose which Page you’d like to activate articles for.
Step 3: Claim your URL
Once you’ve selected your Facebook Page, you’ll be asked to provide a URL you intend to use for articles. This URL will serve as the basis for the URLs of all your posts.
To claim your URL you need to add a meta tag to your HTML’s <head> tag and then add the URL to your settings. All the information you need to do this can be found in the Instant Articles Settings:
Step 4: Create articles
In testing, Facebook discovered that publishers want a single tool to publish articles to the web, mobile apps, or any other places readers see their content. As such, articles can be published directly from your Content Management System — there’s no need to re-create articles within Facebook.
You can sync your blog with Instant Articles via Facebook’s publishing tools, an RSS feed or by using an API. in Instant Articles markup can be found here.
➤ A guide to using the Instant Articles API can be found here.
Step 5: Customize styling
Facebook gives you the option to customize the styling of your articles during setup; here you can upload a logo and select which fonts are used throughout your articles. Font choices are currently limited to the Helvetica Neue and Georgia font families.
Step 6: Submit for review
After you’ve completed the above steps you can submit your feed to be reviewed by Facebook to verify that all articles generated from your website are properly formatted.
Facebook currently aims to review all submissions with 24-48 hours.
