Becoming a news platform the next step in Facebook's evolution
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FACEBOOK is set to become a news platform once the company releases new software for the creation of fast, interactive material called Instant Articles.
According to Facebook Media, it is working with nine publishers – The New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed, the National Broadcasting Co, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC News, Spiegel and Bild – as launch partners of Instant Articles.
The innovation is designed to give publishers control over their stories, brand experience and monetisation opportunities, said the social-media giant.
Publishers can sell ads in their articles and keep the revenue, or they can choose to use Facebook’s Audience Network to monetise unsold inventory.
They will also have the ability to track data and traffic through comScore and other analytic tools.
Facebook founder and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg has also been using this social network to make announcements about other developments such as the Internet.org app.
For instance, he recently posted a video on his timeline, saying, “Here’s my full video explaining our approach and what we announced today.”
With more and more people across the world, not least in Thailand, getting their news via social media, it is expected that this new application will create a change in the digital advertising landscape.
In Thailand, a lot more people now get news via their smartphone, through the major social-media apps, Facebook and Twitter. So many news companies, especially TV broadcasters, hook their news programmes with live tweets during a broadcast with the aim of engaging with their audiences across the platforms.
Almost all news businesses – newspapers and TV broadcasters – have a presence on the most popular social-network platform in Thailand, Facebook, in order to draw traffic to their news websites.
The launch of Instant Articles is, therefore, expected to be a disruptive innovation for Thai news publishers.
Apart from being a news platform, Facebook has also set its positioning as a marketing platform for business, and especially small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), given that so many users spend a great deal of time on the social network every day.
According to the recent “The eCommerce Path to Purchase Journey” study conducted by TNS Thailand, a market-research company, Facebook is the leading social-media platform for Thai consumers in all stages of their online purchase journey.
The study describes the role of Facebook as a social marketplace for Thai consumers, with it being the No 1 platform for e-commerce users, ahead of other touch points such as search engines and word of mouth.
Facebook is also ranked as the preferred mobile shopping channel, across all steps of the path to purchase, from discovery and research to consideration, decision-making and actual purchase.
Facebook is the platform with which people have the most engagement, said Arrow Guo, head of SMB for Greater China and Southeast Asia at Facebook.
Facebook has 1.44 billion monthly users worldwide, of whom around 1.25 billion are using the platform on a mobile device.
Meanwhile, there are some 30 million monthly Facebook users in Thailand, of which around 28 million use it on a mobile device.
Around 21 million people in Thailand use Facebook every day, with 93 per cent of them doing so on a mobile, he said.
