Social Media

Facebook API Changes

August 14th, 2018 | by: Astin Pollack | Posted in : Social Media

Facebook rolled out changes to their API on August 1, 2018. These changes impacted how partners of Facebook, like Hootsuite and Buffer, which are used to automatically schedule and manage posts, use their data. It will be no longer possible to post or schedule to post to personal Facebook profiles. Profiles will be removed from the social network picker in the old compose box, new composer, bulk composer, publisher calendar, RSS feed setup, and the Hootsuite mobile apps. Messages scheduled to Facebook profiles after August 1st will fail to publish. Note that Facebook profiles will still be supported in the dashboard for monitoring, assigning and sharing from streams. There are no impacts on publishing to Facebook Pages or groups. Also it will no longer be possible to target organic posts by gender or language when publishing to Facebook Pages. Age targeting will also be limited to specifying a minimum age of 13, 17, 18, 19 or 21.

Targeting by location, interested in, relationship, and education will still be supported. With the deprecation of the live API Publish actions permission, this change does not allow an app to publish on behalf of users. This permission will be reserved for approved partners only. A new permission model that allows apps to publish Videos to their User's Groups and Timeline will be created instead. Although this timing for the depreciation does not give some desktop apps and hardware partners enough time to make the switch as they have very long product lifecycles. Facebook gave desktop apps and hardware partners a 6-month and a 12-month extension. Facebook’s partnership team will work closely with the developers to make sure they comply with the Facebook platform policies. This is one of the many changes that are coming with Facebook’s promise to value user security and privacy after the backlash Facebook faced over many scandals involving user data being misused. Remember these changes went into effect on August 1, 2018.

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