Facebook stops sharing & scheduled sharing from Hootsuite

Facebook made an announcment that they were stopping sharing to your profile via the API on April 24th, with a target date of 1st of August for the changes.  This has effected apps like Hootsuite and Buffer who use the API to make posts of personal profiles.  

Here's the original post https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2018/04/24/new-facebook-platform-product-changes-policy-updates/

Facebook made an announcment that they were stopping sharing to your profile via the API on April 24th, with a target date of 1st of August for the changes.  This has effected apps like Hootsuite and Buffer who use the API to make posts of personal profiles.  

Here's the original post https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2018/04/24/new-facebook-platform-product-changes-policy-updates/

Why did this happen?

This happened, because of GDPR.  Facebook has realised that it is important that they do not share your personal information with other apps as theres a risk of loss of data control.  Most of this started with the Cambridge Analytica scandle.  But GDPR only covers people's data, not companies data.  Therefore, in our testing, we noticed you can still schedule posts to Facebook business pages.

How will this effect people?

This will effect people who are trying to brand themselves, as experts, or celebrities etc.  But even in those instances, it would usually be sensible to have a page related to your industry or you as a person.  So you can avoid those problems.  Annoyingly, if you want to post to your personal profile or share from the page, it will mean you then have to share the pages posts manually, and you can't schedule personal posts.

However, businesses should be able to carry on as normal.  Clearly smaller businesses have a strong correlation between the owner and the business, but larger businesses less so.  We don't usually take the approach of posting to a personal profile as that's not within our strategy, and we think business and personal infomration should be separated for marketing campaigns.  Ideally, your strategy involves some sort of outreach, whether you do this via Facebook groups, Facebook ads or something else.  Due to this, our strategy has not really been effected by this change, and our customers are still getting the same service.

Never the less, it is something to think about.  One good thing that will come out of this change is that some pages which claim to offer you a free test, or compare your photo to a celebrity etc, will find it much harder to gain access to your personal information.  So all in all, this is a good move by Facebook in our opinion.

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