Facebook has now officially opened up its Instant Articles to all publishers. The platform is available to anyone who wants to import their content into Facebook while adding it to a user's News Feed.
The new program of Instant Articles will no longer be necessary to post links that drive users to a publisher's website. Users on Facebook are constantly opening up Instant Articles by 20% more than mobile web articles, and they also share more content by 30% from the platform, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Facebook's product manager Josh Roberts said, "More than one thousand publishers worldwide are officially part of the program, and at every step of the way, we see clear evidence that Instant Articles provides a better reading experience for people and a significant boost for publishers looking to reach their audiences on Facebook."
The company admitted that there is a 70% chance mobile users would less likely abandon Instant Articles "because they're not stuck waiting for it to load". If a publisher wants to quickly share content to as much readers as possible, those data points are for them to experiment with Instant Articles while devising ways to use it for their advantage.
The company explained that Facebook's algorithm uses factors like article shares and engagement to figure out what certain users are looking for to see in their news feed. Aside from that, new partners and tools have been provided which includes integrations with Medium, WordPress, ShareThis, RebelMouse, Tempest, Sovrn and Adobe Analytics.
In addition, the company also announced a new chatbot communication which will make it easier for publishers and companies to interact with customers through its Messenger. The chatbot would automatically respond to a customer to help do biddings and perform tasks, where users will most likely receive links to content they might be interested in.
Google has also been in battle with Facebook for faster loading time to give users improved mobile experiences coming from both platforms. Alphabet's parent company of Google has released the Accelerated Mobile Pages aiming to prevent slow browser load. The difference is that Facebook has the advantage here because users can drive direct content and share within the platform itself, on the other hand with Google's initiative shows that it can be used by other platforms such as Twitter because of its open-source format.
Product manager for Adobe Analytics Trevor Paulsen told VentureBeat, Facebook is looking to keep users in their app, while Google wants them to spend more time with the mobile web, certainly both companies seek advertising shares.
"Time will tell as to whether Facebook or Google's solution will be more widely adopted. It's essentially a question of who gets more traffic, Facebook's app or Google's search engine on mobile web. We see this as an epic app vs mobile web battle. Facebook wants to keep you in their app, whereas Google wants you in the mobile web, both for their share of advertising. Publishers will want to implement both to see which is more impactful to their business." said Paulsen.
