What Happened
After a few months of slow progress, Facebook is making some moves to ramp up its content distribution initiative Instant Articles, launched back in May. A number of new publishers have joined previous partners to publish their content natively on Facebook’s platform so as to ensure faster access, with The Washington Post being the most radical, claiming that it will soon start publishing all of its stories directly on Facebook via Instant Articles. Moreover, Facebook is also allowing publishers to push content directly to Facebook as Instant Articles from their content management system (CMS) of choice, which greatly simplifies the process and could lure more publications to try out Instant Articles.
What Brands Should Do
As we pointed out previously, the introduction of Instant Articles signals Facebook’s ambitious plan to turn its social network platform into a closed-off mobile ecosystem for digital content, and these recent developments detailed above certainly seem to support the idea. As content discovery becoming increasingly dependent on social – over 60% of Americans now use social media as a news source – it is important for media owners and brands alike to test Facebook’s offerings first to see if its platform works for their specific purposes.
Source: The Verge & The Next Web