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Pulse Ghana, first in West Africa to embrace Instant Articles

With the introduction of Instant Articles, Pulse Ghana readers will now easily load key stories right on their Facebook timeline.

Links with the power icon can be loaded as Instant Articles on Facebook

With the introduction of Instant Articles, Pulse Ghana readers will now easily load key stories right on their Facebook timeline. FBIA optimises stories to load and open directly on Facebook mobile apps.

Ringier Ghana, a leading media house in digital publishing, is a subsidiary of Ringier AG,  the largest international operating media company in Switzerland. RGL will use this latest medium of expansion to grow its superiority in online reach and improve user experience.

Emeka Dele, RGL’s Head of Marketing, said the team has noted that there has been a significant spike in traffic and engagement since FBIA was rolled out.

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“With the constant evolution of social media, the Facebook Instant Article is yet another advance tool we are opened to explore & we already see improvement on reads via this new tool”, he said.

Godfred Akoto Boafo, RGL’s Co-Product Manager for Digital Publishing, said this was just another way for Pulse Ghana to push the boundaries and enhance content distribution.

“At Pulse Ghana our aim is to push the boundaries in finding news mediums that will enhance content distribution and our success with this first publication on Facebook Instant Articles takes us closer to that aim. We have already made breakthroughs using and this new development further cements Pulse Ghana as Ghana's leading online news source”, said Akoto Boafo.

Josh Roberts, Facebook Product Manager, in a statement said that the use of Instant Articles by publishers resulted to a 20 and 30 per cent increase in readership and shares, respectively. He also noted that once readers click on the article, they were 70 per cent less likely to abandon it.

“More than one thousand publishers worldwide are officially part of the program, and at every step of the way, we see clear evidence that Instant Articles provides a better reading experience for people and a significant boost for publishers looking to reach their audiences on Facebook,” said Roberts.

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Using Instant Articles, media houses and have articles load 10 times faster than other posts on Facebook, is set to make it easy for people to get news on mobile gadgets even when internet connection is poor.

Media houses can thus show readers using Facebook mobile a fast-loading version of their posts, while still also displaying some of their ads and measuring pageviews.

“We have invested heavily in optimizing performance on Android, with the goal of providing the best mobile reading experience for people everywhere, no matter where they are in the world or what connection or device they are on,” said Roberts.

Previously, Instant Articles was only available to a select number of official publisher partners such as the BBC and The New York Times who were some of the select few hundred publications that used the platform for a pilot test ahead of its official release.

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