Sunday, August 5, 2018

Facebook Stinks and Other Updates

So, Facebook has apparently made changes to its policies, particularly those that allow third party apps to post to Facebook.  This includes scheduling apps like If-This-Then-This and Hootsuite, which can be used in a variety of ways to pre-plan posts and links, and to schedule them in advance.   I understand this is a method of combating bots, but it seems there would be a way to help real individuals keep using the service in a more convenient manner.

I have generally been using If-This-Then-This to automatically link blog posts to Facebook.  Blogger lets me schedule a day and time for the blog post to hit the blog and then IFTTT would automatically post to Facebook when a new blog was posted.  It made the whole process nearly seamless and ensured that if I were on top of things, new posts would hit the blog at 6:00 am each morning and a link would be posted to Facebook at that same time as well.  This is important because I can see that most of the readership is coming from Facebook links.

With the new changes, I can no longer seamlessly link the blog to my Facebook page.  The new post is still generally hitting the blog at 6:00 am each morning (including this one), but I'm having to manually post the link to Facebook.  It seems something may also be going on with their algorithm downplaying linked postings, as the readership numbers have dropped to a single digit.  I'm not sure they the links are even being seen.

With that in mind, I'll also be pasting the entire content of this blog to Facebook just as a separate post to see if it breaks through without the link.

Further, I want to remind readers that are so interested, that I have enabled subscription options to make sure you can continue to follow the blog in other ways should you so desire.  You can get an email sent to you each time a new blog is posted with the Follow by Email box to the right.  You can subscribe to the posts below that, even using an RSS feed if you so desire.  If you want to keep reading and there is any way I can help you do so, let me know and I will assist in any way I can.

I appreciate everyone who is reading and the feedback I have received.  I'm going to keep plugging away at this and just wanted to let you know, I'm up to making alternate arrangements to keep this accessible.

Thank you all.  Will keep you posted.


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