We just got an email from Facebook and WordPress.com updating us about an upcoming change Facebook is introducing to their platform, and which affects how many of you may share posts from your WordPress website to your Facebook account.
Starting August 1, 2018, third-party tools can no longer share posts automatically to Facebook Profiles. This includes Publicize, Social Networks Auto Poster {SNAP} – Pro Plugin for WordPress and the likes, that connects your site to major social media platforms (like Tumblr, PATH, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook).
Will this affect your ability to auto-share content on Facebook?
Actually it’s not that simple, and the answer is “It depends 🙂 “
If you’ve connected a Facebook Profile to your site, then yes: these plugins will no longer be able to share your posts to Facebook.
On the other hand, nothing will change if you keep a Facebook Page connected to your site — all your content should still appear directly on Facebook via your plugin functionality.
It’s important you know the difference here so if you are not sure what the difference is between a Page and a Profile, here’s Facebook’s explanation.
- Facebook Profile : A profile is a personal Facebook account where you can share information like your interests, photos, videos, current city and hometown.
- Facebook Page: Pages are public profiles that let artists, public figures, businesses, brands, organizations and nonprofits connect with their fans or customers. When someone likes a Page on Facebook, they can start seeing updates from that Page in their News Feed (but as we know not ALL of them, unless they are paid for by the Page owner). However, you must have a profile to create a Page or help manage one.
You can review and change your social sharing settings by heading to My Site(s) → Sharingon WordPress.com.
What to do if you are posting to your Facebook Profile
If you’ve previously connected a Facebook Profile to your WordPress.com site and still want your Facebook followers to see your posts, you have two options. First, you could go the manual route: once you publish a new post, copy its URL and share the link in a new Facebook post.
The other option is to convert your Facebook Profile to a Page. This might not be the right solution for all of you, but it’s something to consider if your website focuses on your business, organization, or brand.
While Facebook says it is introducing this change to improve their platform and prevent the misuse of personal profiles, we believe that eliminating cross-posting from WordPress is another step back in Facebook’s support of the open web, especially since it affects people’s ability to interact with their network (unless they’re willing to pay for visibility)
We know that this will cause some disruption to a small number of our clients and it may affect how your Facebook followers interact. We have had a quick scan our all our clients and found that all but a couple are using Facebook Pages sp will not be affected by this round of changes (yes, pay attention, as these pop up and change ALL the time 😉 )
If this DOES affect you, and you’d like to share your concerns with Facebook, we urge you to head to Facebook’s Help Community to speak out
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