Social media integration is an important function for just about any website. When you create new content on your website, it’s convenient to be able to automatically share that content across all your social media platforms the moment you press the publish button. However, recently Facebook announced a change to its policy that goes into effect tomorrow, August 1, 2018, which effectively breaks the ability of any third-party platform to automatically share content to your personal Timeline. This move is part of a long line of changes Facebook has made of late to clean up abuse of their service so that the content you see is the content you actually want. Unfortunately, this makes sharing content to your Timeline a more manual process. Fortunately, it’s not an onerous process, since you can simply copy the link to your content to a new post on your Timeline, but it does reduce some of the convenience users previously enjoyed. Last night Automattic pushed out an update to their Jetpack plugin to remove the ability to select your Facebook profile when connecting your WordPress-powered website to social media and adds an informational warning about your existing Facebook profile connections, if you have any. Do note that this does not affect connections to Facebook Pages, only personal profiles. If you care to voice your thoughts about this change to Facebook, visit their Help Community to express your concerns about this change. Jetpack Publicize is still an extremely useful and powerful feature and will continue to be built into most of the websites that Dragonspire Media builds.
