This week the big news in social, editorial and marketing is Facebook’s announcement that they would be hosting publisher content, allowing publishers to post directly on Facebook. Their blog post said the main aim was to speed loading times for news articles for mobile users.
It’s probably no surprise for any mobile users out there that news links shared on Facebook take an average of 8 seconds to load. The company said Instant Articles would make the experience up to ten times faster.
Facebook has nine launch partners for Instant Articles, including some of the most respected publishers out there: The New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed, NBC, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC News, Spiegel and Bild.
While faster speeds would be a definite plus, some people have been expressing concern at the long term ramifications of the move.
We’ve used Wordtracker’s free Chrome extension Scout to analyse 3 articles on the topic, so we can uncover the language behind the stories.
"Facebook Instant Articles: A Slippery Slope For Google To Do The Same, Hurting The Web?" by Marketing Land
Danny Sullivan, while acknowledging the frustration of waiting for a news article to load from a Facebook link, raises concerns about the ramifications. Firstly, increasing publisher dependency on the Facebook News Feed Algorithm, but primarily the possibility that Google could follow Facebook’s move, resulting in 2 giant gatekeepers swallowing up the web.
"The media reckoning is here: Facebook rolls out its 'Instant Articles' publisher platform" by Mashable
Jason Abbruzzese & Jenni Ryall consider the impossible position publishers are in, “damned if they do, damned if they don’t” as they try to balance the lure of Facebook traffic with handing over control to the social media giant.
"Facebook Now Puts Full Articles From Big Publishers in Your News Feed" by Gizmodo
Jamie Condliffe explores the improvements we’ll see with the change which will be most noticeable in the articles themselves. He also questions the impact this will have on the media landscape as mobile users have even fewer reasons to wander outside Facebook’s gated community.
We'll keep an eye on how this story progresses and whether the hopes and concerns of the authors come to fruition.
As you can see, with the help of Wordtracker's free Scout Chrome extension we've gathered unique insight into the language, keywords and themes of the articles.
You can easily use Scout in the same way on your competitor websites to analyze their focus and then import the results into your Wordtracker keywords account to research them further.
See in more detail how Scout works here.
