Facebook Enhances Branded Content In Instant Articles

Having accepted that “branded content is a growing part of publisher business”, Facebook also realised that in allowing branded content on the platform supports publishers. Publishers share a huge amount of content, so it’s only natural that the company loves them.

When branded content began to be allowed in Instant Articles, there were certain article stylings available, as well as bylines and kickers. Now, Facebook has a whole lot more to offer. In a recent Facebook Media blog post, Product Manager Josh Roberts, and News Partnerships Andy Mitchell, announced

[quote]support for marketer logos at the top of the article and updated features in the style editor. People have told us that branded content that is overly promotional is less engaging, so we’ve designed these tools to give publishers elegant customization and branding options for marketers within their Instant Articles.[/quote]

The new features and changes, are the following:

Marketer Logo In Instant Article Byline

When identifying a third party product, brand or sponsor in an article, the logo will automatically be pulled from their Facebook Page and placed in the byline of the publisher’s Instant Article. This feature will be available at the end of June 2016, and when it does become available, logos will appear to the left of an Instant  Article’s byline.

Updated Article Style Editor

Facebook is also updating the Instant Articles Style Editor to make it a lot easier for publishers to style their content exactly how they want to.

[quote]a publisher can use our existing article styling tools to visually distinguish branded content from editorial content, as well as meet contractual obligations established with the content sponsor. [/quote]

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The Style Editor now supports “new coloring, text, and spacing features”, and has an added “real-time preview tool that shows publishers what their edits look like as they make them”.

These updates will be available “in the coming weeks”.

Customisable Article Byline & Kicker

Publishers can still add and customise byline text, and now they can add a kicker which they can customise as well. This feature is available immediately.

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Of course, in order for publishers to able to use branded content  they need to user the branded content tag to identify it as such. If you want to find out more about these features, branded content and Instant Articles have a look here.