UPDATE: The folks at Hootsuite are seriously “Johnny-On-The-Spot”! They’ve already made fixes so that the following blog post is already outdated. BOOM! Nevertheless, I’ll leave this post up as a record of how much chaos heavy-handed API changes can cause for end-users. 😉
In case you haven’t noticed, Facebook made some API changes recently that resulted in a significant shift in how third-party platforms function, even when not being used to post or schedule posts to Facebook.
Here’s part of the explanation/notice from Hootsuite:
“Facebook requires that messages posted to Facebook be fully user generated, and not pre-filled with any content that the user did not write themselves.” You can read the rest here: Facebook Platform Policy 2.3 Updates.
The bottom line is that the Hootlet no longer works like it used to, even if you are scheduling for Twitter, not Facebook. After a little bit of experimentation, here’s how the Hootlet now seems to works for Twitter.
- Navigate to an article you want to share. Click the Hootlet icon in your toolbar.
- The new dialogue/share window which pops up will look like this:
- Select the Twitter profile you want to post to or schedule for.
- Your Twitter post will be constructed with the following parameters:
- Here’s the info from the previous image after being shared on Twitter, noting that the content below the “C” link will NOT show up in your Twitter post:
Have I left anything out? Let me know in the comments!