19 Jul Facebook will be Facebook
Last Monday 17th July, Facebook was supposed to push out a new API update. Now as boring and techy nerdy as this might sound, if you use Facebook for other purposes than keeping tabs on your friends, you better listen up.
In short, users will no longer be allowed to edit the headlines, descriptions or featured images that make up link previews seen in the news feed. Instead, Facebook will simply pull this data (headline, description or featured image) from the url itself and use them for the link preview.
So unless you go through the process of claiming ownership of every website you manage (a process that is still very vague) or else make sure that every single page on your website is optimized to pull the correct data (most websites aren’t), linking your webpages from Facebook will look horrid and you will lose clicks, engagement and everything else.
Just to put you in the picture here’s an example of a URL and how it previews on Facebook. The first example shows how it appears when we still have the capability of editing it, and the second is how it would look if this capability is removed, i.e. when the API update is enforced by Facebook.
Example 1
Example 2
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This change they said will also affect any scheduled posts that go through third party apps such as Post Planner, Social Pilot, Hoot Suite, Postcron and the like
To see how any url will look once it publishes, you can go here and add the link.
The good news is that whilst the update seems to have been pushed out to personal profiles, it is now two days later and Facebook have not pushed it out to pages as yet. The official reason is that they are giving websites time to claim ownership of their websites (till September), but we’re hoping that they might be changing their minds all together and perhaps will let page owners be.
I very much doubt it though.
Facebook said that this was being done in an effort to combat “Fake News” but Social Media Managers and agencies are up in arms.
Still we all know that Facebook will be Facebook and what they say goes!
We Are What We Share have the experience and expertise to circumvent this limitation and to ensure that all its customers’ Facebook activity keeps running smoothly.
Whilst we’re still hoping that Facebook change their mind, we’ve already taken all the precautions necessary to ensure that our clients’ pages are not affected.
Please do not hesitate to contact us for further information or help.
