The Ever-Changing Facebook & How To Keep Up
Just when you think you have it all figured out, Facebook decides to throw you another curveball. Earlier this month, Facebook decided to dig into the information that apps have access to when connected to the Facebook platform in order to better protect user’s information. While this change isn’t all bad, it has caused many businesses, including ours, to make a shift in strategies and work around the implemented changes.
Our company, along with many others, uses third-party social apps like Sprout Social or Hootsuite that integrate Facebook and Instagram to easily schedule posts, interact with followers and tag partners for various accounts. With the new privacy updates, we are no longer able to have a one-stop-shop approach for the content we post on behalf of our clients, BUT not to fear, we have created a few tricks and workarounds to not impact our workflow entirely:
- Facebook Private Messages: Pages added after April 4,2018 will temporarily be unable to use the private messaging function but pages that were connected prior to April 4th are not affected by this change. The workaround: Our onboarding process allows us backend access to our clients’ pages, enabling us to still monitor the channel daily and respond to any messages, comments or questions from followers.
- Facebook Publishing: You can no longer mention a page when composing a new post. The workaround: This is the biggest burden on our team because we focus on maintaining and highlighting different pages and influencers to keep the pages interactive and engaging. We will tap into the backside of the channel after the post is published and tag all appropriate people and pages.
- Facebook Competitor Report: You can no longer add competitors to the report. The workaround: We have been doing our research and adding all competitive pages to watch before this deadline. If we should need to add more in the future, the backend access will allow us to monitor our competitors, just on a different platform.
- Instagram Competitor Report: This feature is still available as long as the page has the Instagram Business Profile add-on connection to Sprout Social. The workaround: We connect all pages to the Business Profile add-on during onboarding, so we can take a breath and relax with this one.
Following their announcement of changes, Facebook eluted to more changes in the upcoming months. We are armed and ready for whatever will be thrown our way next. Have more questions about the ever-changing dynamic of Facebook? Let us help!
