Facebook Instant Articles and Sharing?

[drastic]

Hi,

I am very outdated and haven't been active with forums, so pardon if the question is silly.

Is there an RSS feed that will allow me to use Article Manager with Facebook's Instant Articles?

And...

When I share an article on Facebook, will there be a large preview image? This is assuming that my articles have a big image attached.

I recall the older version of XF had very ugly looking shares when something was shared to Facebook. It made the content virtually unclickable and I ended up ditching XF for a project because of it.

Wondering if things have improved and I can utilize this for a new project. Anything is better than WordPress and this addon has always been lightyears faster!

 

[Bob]

I can only respond to the XF1 version of AMS as the XF2 Version is still under development and may or may not have what you are looking for...

AMS 1.x has its own FEEDER which is a clone of the XenForo FEEDER. If you can use the XenForo Feeder to create threads via Facebooks Instant Articles, then you can use AMS's FEEDER to create AMS Articles via Facebooks Instant Articles. Both feeders will work with any Industry Standard RSS Feed (must comply to industry standards). Im sure that if facebook provides an RSS feed for their Instant Articles, that its industry standard. If it doesn't work with XenForo's feeder, its not going to work with AMS's.

Nothing has changed with Sharing in the XF1 versions of my addons. You can test it out here. Just create an article, upload some images, set one as the cover image and see how it reacts to the facebook sharing. My guess is that its going to look ugly as the LOOK of it is controlled by facebook, not AMS (or XenForo for that matter).

 

[drastic]

I checked a few article shares on FB. For some reason, even though the article has a picture that's big enough, it still keeps displaying the small preview which not that many people click on.

It doesn't show the author either, which helps generate more followers for writers. However, that would be part of the Facebook Instant Articles RSS feed info and not exactly something on the article itself.

I believe you would need a custom RSS feed for this addon to be compatible with Facebook's instant article program. Xenforo 1 didn't think intuitively when it came to sharing things socially. It was hard to generate any traffic using that script and we ended up scrapping it entirely.

FBIA is pretty awesome though and the monetizing is fairly easy. It imports your articles, makes them load super fast on mobile, and people should use it if they have clean family friendly content. Surely you want to get people OFF Facebook and onto your site, but you can create an audience there and use that to populate your forum/articles.

Here's more info if you'd like to check it out and whip up an RSS for users.
RSS - Instant Articles - Documentation - Facebook for Developers

Here's a sample of my RSS, if you'd like to see it. Where you see the author is one thing we need to update. Ours used to show the author on the FB previews, but it stopped and we have to fix it.
https://trendingviews.co/facebook/rss

Here's a few screenshots of tests, in case it helps give you some ideas.

The first is a small preview, but the article has a very big image, so your FBIA RSS would have to tell FB which pic to use. Usually I THINK it's the FBOG image for that pic, so your users would have to ensure they are allowing their site to have an image that is at least 600-650 pixels wide.

The second image is what the big previews look like. They generate a good amount of clicks. Mine has the author missing because we need to update our RSS feed.

Hope it helps!