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A Guide to Facebook Instant Setup

  • By Meherzad Patel
  • August 12, 2016

Most of us by now will know what Facebook instant is. For the uninitiated it is a product for publishers to create fast interactive articles on Facebook by stripping out extra code and displays articles to you in milliseconds.

Now let’s not get to deep into what makes instant articles tick and load like lightning (pun intended), I’m here to tell you how to set it up for your site assuming it is on WordPress.

 

  1.  Install this plugin here in your WordPress site.
  2. On your Facebook page sign up for instant articles. This will allow you to access the configuration settings for the articles. Don’t forget to give yourself admin access so you can complete the steps that follow.
  3. You will need to register your site’s URL in the configuration panel on Facebook. You do this by adding a snippet of code in your website’s html code in the theme header file. This tells Facebook that this is your website and articles will be published from there.
  4. We now need to add the RSS feed URL into WordPress. This allows Facebook to pick up newly published articles from your WordPress website. For example the feed URL looks like this.
  5. So Facebook now knows which website and from where in the website will articles be posted. This leads us to the task of styling the content. You can now also install the Page managers app on your mobile phone to to test how the articles will look when finally published.
  6. Styling the articles as required by Facebook for text, Images requires a bit coding knowledge. This is where your website developers come in handy if you cannot do this on your own. Guidance can be found here.
  7. Once the styling is complete add your site’s logo in the style field within the configuration panel in Facebook. Phew!! The panel looks like this.
  8. All that’s left for us to do now is to submit a minimum of 5 posts/articles from your website so Facebook can check that the formatting follows their standards. This check takes between 3 to 4 days. If you have passed then the “Start Publishing Instant Articles” button becomes active in the configuration panel.

 

If you don’t pass in the 1st attempt don’t fret, they will provide you with guide lines in the articles that you have submitted pointing out areas that need correction. Once corrections have been made resubmit you articles for approval. It can take a few tries to get this right but once you do it’s rewarding to see your articles load really fast for all your viewers.

Note: Facebook does not automatically convert all your posts into instant articles, you can chose which posts to publish as instant articles at all times.

An in-depth how to video can be found here.