Facebook is no longer just a chat media; it’s a Digital Marketing Hub

Social media giant, Facebook’s role in online publishing and advertising has just vastly expanded, so much so that the new tools and features introduced by the company are changing the very nature of online content promotion. First, consider the social marketing trends that have been prevalent on the Internet in 2015. Then, consider Facebook’s biggest feature additions. The majority of online content is now being consumed on mobile devices. In the spring, Facebook introduced its Instant Articles tool, which allows publishers to create appealing mobile-first posts directly on the network. The Live streaming video trend has taken off after Meerkat’s debut at SXSWi in March. Facebook recently announced the upcoming launch of Facebook Live, a tool that lets verified users stream videos to their network in real time. With Facebook’s video content earning as much as four billion views on a daily basis, it was only logical that Facebook has implemented a monetization system for its wildly popular video publishing feature this summer.

Facebook Instant Articles
Over the years, Facebook has shifted from being a source of information about the lives of people within one’s friend list to a primary source of news and current events happening all over the world. In a recent Pew Internet survey, 63 percent of respondents said Facebook was their go-to source for news, and half of those people follow a news story or event exclusively through the social network. Unsurprisingly, for many media organizations, a big part of referral traffic for online content comes from Facebook.
In May, Facebook cut out the middle man by allowing a select group of media outlets to publish directly to the network using a new feature called Instant Articles. These articles are optimized for mobile users and boast shorter loading times compared to posts that link out to an external site. Facebook Instant Articles also promise to offer a much more interactive experience for readers by means of auto-playing video, audio captions, the ability to zoom in to high-resolution photographs and more.
The issue is that Facebook Instant Articles were initially rolled out to a small group of users and an even smaller group of publishers.The first companies to benefit from the feature were media outlets like BuzzFeed and The New York Times, which already ranked as the top news publishers on the social network.

Benefits for Digital marketers: So what can a smaller-scale organization draw from the trend that seemed to have been launched by Instant Articles? First, their appearance once again emphasizes the importance of mobile-first content and optimizing your web properties for consumption on smartphones and tablets. If your Facebook Page contains links to external sources that aren’t mobile-friendly, you may already be losing audience to your competitors with optimized or mobile-first.