Why I decided to connect my blog to Facebook Instant Articles
Implementing Facebook Instant Articles on my blog was not an easy decision – and all the pros and cons had to be considered. Here are some of the reasons and learnings behind this decision.
For context: I own and curate one of the largest UX blogs in Latin America, all written in Portuguese. That’s the blog I refer to throughout this article.
What are Facebook Instant Articles?
Facebook Instant Articles are a lighter version of articles that show up on the user’s newsfeed while they’re using the Facebook mobile app and decide to click on a link. The goal of Instant Articles is to provide a better, faster and more pleasant reading experience inside Facebook on mobile devices.
It all started with an issue seen by Facebook on its app: news and articles were taking too long to load on a smartphone. The average wait time between clicking on a link and starting to read the article is 8 seconds. Definitely too much time for Facebook, and a big roadblock for users who click on a link shared by their friends on the social network.
Technically, this is how Instant Articles work: instead of having the Facebook app open a web page within its embedded browser, the app simply pulls content from that web page – and displays it on a template pre-defined by the app.
To see an example of an Instant Article, visit my blog’s fanpage using the Facebook app on your phone, and click on a recent post (like this one).
Since Instant Articles became available, my team of collaborators and I have started to consider pros and cons of connecting our blog to Facebook to enable that feature. Are we sure we want to give away all our content for Facebook to manage? What do we win and what do we lose in this process, as our readers shift from reading our content our website, to doing it within the Facebook app itself?
What we lose: page views
When people click on a post from our Facebook page, the app will load an Instant Article instead of our website, which means one less page view when we look at our wordpress analytics dashboard.
For sites and blogs that depend on advertising to survive, that decrease in page views represents a big risk for their business model. When users don’t visit the website, that means they are also not seeing the banner ads served by the publisher. Less page views = less profit. There’s a much more controversial topic to be discussed in a future post about the need of new business models for the publishing industry and about Instant Articles being another way Facebook has found to create a more controlled and centralized version of the web (and steal online advertising market share from Google).
That’s not our case. We don’t run on ads, we have no intention in making money with our blog, and in reality we pay for servers, maintenance and third-party services ourselves. Which means fewer page views would have zero impact in our business model.
What we lose: related content
Less users visiting our site from their phones also means less users exploring all the related content we offer. Looking at our metrics, we noticed that it is a very common behavior for users to start clicking around our menu to explore post categories and series that are somehow related to the article they’ve just read.
That’s definitely a loss for us. The template used by Facebook on its Instant Articles has its own related content recommendation system at the bottom of the page – but it won’t give users any access to our site’s navigation and archive.
That means more constraints in terms of offering users different paths to content.
We still need more time to evaluate the real impact of that change in our metrics, but we’ve observed a trend where the average number of page views per visit has decreased 4%.
Not terrible, but not ideal.
What we lose: other social networks
Facebook obviously wants to keep everything at arm’s length. When you finish reading an Instant Article and click the Share button, Facebook has control over the options you have for sharing it with your friends – and Facebook itself is obviously the prioritized one.
That means a much more limited user flow for our readers – a user coming from Facebook will likely share the link on Facebook. What does that mean in terms of earned traffic for a blog?
Over the last couple weeks we’ve naturally noticed a small decrease in the number of people sharing our content on Twitter and Linkedin; on the other hand, the volume of sharing on Facebook has increased considerably. Looking deeper into our metrics we realized Instant Articles was worth it in that sense – a user who reads an Instant Article on Facebook is much more likely to share the content than another user who reads our articles on our mobile site.
What the user gets: a better reading experience
It is hard to argue against the benefits of Instant Articles for users. They see the link, they click, they read the content — instantly and with no distractions. Here are some of the key benefits for users who are reading these new types of articles on Facebook:
Load speed
Instant Articles remove each and every element that is unnecessary for reading the content. No javascripts to load, no site-specific CSS, no third-party plugins. The impact on load speed is undeniable – even when comparing with websites that already have a mobile-optimized version.
Instantaneity
Since the template used by Instant Articles is native to the Facebook app, users get the feeling that the experience is much more instantaneous. Also, the way the panel slides in from the right when users click on an article makes the loading process seem much more natural and seamlessly connected to the app experience.
Optimized for reading
The template design used by Instant Article is intentionally clean and minimal. Options such as font family, font size and colors cannot be customized by the publisher. The default black and white template created by Facebook has been thought through with the reading experience in mind.
No distractions
Not our case, but there are a lot of websites out there that are full of popups, banners and sign-up-now forms that will distract users from what they were trying to do on the page in the first place: read the article. Instant Articles eliminate all that clutter.
All these advantages added up sounded much bigger than the down sides mentioned earlier in this article. Also, we are talking about a User Experience blog; it’s only natural that we would prioritize any decision that could improve the user’s experience with our content in any way.
What we get: higher engagement rates
Instant Articles are used by some of the biggest publishers in the world – so it wasn’t that hard for us to find more detailed stats on the impact of this new format on engagement rates.
Highlights:
- 20% more clicks. As people see more Instant Articles in their News Feed, they read 20% more Instant Articles than mobile web articles on average.
- 70% less likely to abandon (!). Once they click, they’re over 70% less likely to abandon the article because they’re not stuck waiting for it to load.
- 30% more shares. People share 30% more Instant Articles than mobile web articles on average, amplifying the read of those types of stories in News Feed.
Eat your own dog food
Since we made the decision of utilizing Instant Articles on our blog, we have started to see a number of benefits – on metrics, on performance, and on how our content is distributed on social media by our readers.
But we are a UX blog, and it would only make sense for us to listen to our users whenever we change something on their experience with us. We’ve now started to collect feedback from our readers about what works and what doesn’t within this new format – and we’re hoping to share the results with the world soon.
Thanks for reading.
