Facebook Opens up Instant Articles to WordPress Users With New Plugin

Facebook has announced that Instant Articles will be available to all publishers next month, on April 12, 2016.

Automattic notes that users of Instant Articles plugin will first have to undergo a review by Facebook for the goal of ensuring their pages are properly formatted, and they have followed the community's standards and content policies.

Apple, whose content and social initiatives take a backseat to their software and hardware, jumped into the mix when they replaced Newsstand with News. While it may not seem like a groundbreaking implementation, the Instant Articles feature will greatly assist those accounts that are connected to both platforms.

Check out the support documents over on Wordpress to find out more.

Facebook and Automattic have been working together on a plug-in that will allow Wordpress blogs to support Instant Articles.

This new Instant Articles feature also includes several optimization improvements for media and visuals for the content creators' articles. If more publishers are willing to participate in the Instant Articles, Facebook will also have more ad inventory to sell. It will also help Facebook protect its interests by encouraging people to stay on Facebook for their news rather than head to other sources.

Even Instagram has a similar strategy - it forbids links on posts to keep users in their network. As the date of Facebook's global rollout of Instant Articles approaches, the social network is preparing the way.

Social networks are building walled gardens. Then, it decided to make it easier for some publishers to share their content on the platform.

"Since January 2015, Facebook referral traffic from publishers dropped by 32 percent, but user interaction on Facebook increased by nearly 3x from 2014 to 2015." . Activate it, and you'll have a compliant feed of Posts, wrapping your core content in the markup Facebook requires. If the standard features aren't enough, that's OK because the plug-in is open source, so you can change whatever you want.

Source: Facebook Opens up Instant Articles to WordPress Users With New Plugin