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Facebook Instant Articles Are Nearly Here!

A year ago, Facebook announced plans to host news stories on the platform. The majority of us are still waiting to test out the new feature as up to now it has only been available to large publishers like Buzzfeed, BBC News and The Guardian.

But you won’t have to wait much longer as Instant Articles will be made available to iPhone and Android users throughout the world from the 12^th April 2016.

When it is released, the content creation platform will allow people to post articles directly onto Facebook, without the need to navigate away from the site. If you are a marketer or business, you will even be able to personalise these articles in line with your corporate branding.

Key features of Instant Articles will include the ability to share high resolution images and autoplay videos. Another interesting feature is its map functionality, which lets you display an interactive map showing the location of where featured pictures were taken.

Facebook hopes that Instant Articles will help users to avoid the problematic page loading speeds of other websites and make it “as much as 10 times faster than the standard mobile web.” With more than one third of people in the UK using their mobile as their main device for surfing the web, this has never been so important!

The company are not only making life easier for users but publishers too. They have said that the feature will make it “fast and easy for all publishers to reach their audiences” as well as boasting a “rich suite of multimedia tools to create dynamic, interactive stories, that will load quickly everywhere on Facebook.”

There will also be the option to advertise on the platform using its integrated service. Up to now, Facebook has said that this will be free but they could of course change their mind about this in the future.

A lot of focus has been put into making Instant Articles mobile-friendly by for example, ensuring that it displays and functions well on these types of devices.

If your website isn’t responsive, or in other words doesn’t work on mobile, you will be falling behind your competitors. Follow Facebook’s lead and bring your company into the digital age by contacting Piranha today!