Facebook Changes

Are you wondering why all of a sudden your social media management system has stopped publishing to your Facebook account? You’re not alone.

On August 1st 2018, Facebook has removed the ‘Publish Actions’ permissions from being accessed by 3rd party applications.

What does this mean?

3rd party applications will no longer be able to publish posts to personal timelines. This solely affects Facebook personal timelines and does not affect business pages being managed by applications.

Why did they do this?

Facebook has been focussed on user experience and making Facebook better to use with less ‘noise’. Unfortunately, many people were using 3rd party applications to spam their personal timelines with their business posts and non-paid advertisements. This has always been against the Facebook terms of service. With the expansion of privacy controls and a limiting of user data being one of the focal points of Facebook recently, they have decided that all posts to personal timelines must be done organically.

How does this affect me?

If you were one of those people that was using a 3rd party application to schedule and publish posts on your behalf to your personal timeline, this functionality will no longer work. You will have to manually publish these posts via the official Facebook application or using the Facebook website.

If you were using 3rd party applications to manage your business pages, nothing will change. Facebook encourages businesses to use their business page for sales and ad related posts. Keep up the good work!

How will this change on Homesync?

Homesync has always abided by Facebook terms of service. While you could previously publish and schedule posts on your personal timeline, we never allowed our smart posting to blast away at your personal timeline.

With this API change, you will no longer be able to publish posts directly to your personal account on Facebook via Homesync. If you manage business pages on Homesync, your service will be unaffected.