Facebook to Discourage Apps From Auto-Posting on News Feed

Facebook is making some important changes to the way an app can share content on the social network. Earlier, a lot of apps could automatically post updates on Facebook, which sounds like a good idea in theory, but really just means a sudden wall of spam. Facebook however is now going to discourage developers from auto-posting from apps, and instead is promoting explicit sharing - by having a share to Facebook button in the app.

In a post on Facebook, Peter Yang, who works in Platform Product Marketing at Facebook, has written that people engage more with stories that are shared "explicitly rather than implicitly, and often feel surprised or confused by stories that are shared implicitly or automatically."

That people would rather see updates that their friends wanted to share instead of seeing every move a person makes by default seems like common sense, but the figures to support this logic are very interesting.

According to the post, the number of implicitly shared stories has dropped in the past one year, as people marked them as spam. This decline correlated with how often people mark app posts as spam, which dropped by 75% over the same period. The post adds, "In the coming months, we will continue to prioritize explicitly shared stories from apps in News Feed and Ticker over implicitly shared stories."

Facebook seems to be trying to find a balance between automated and explicit behaviour - whether it's through the addition of an ask button that will make people engage more, or adding Shazam-like features to make check-ins even faster and automatic.

For developers whose apps rely on a Facebook presence, the post suggests marking the stories as explicit during the submission process to Facebook. This is done by having a share to Facebook button in the app, so users can pick and choose what to share, instead of automatically posting updates for them.

Facebook also suggests developers use its new Message Dialog, which will let you share posts and activity directly to other users, instead of posting it to the timeline.

Another tool that could benefit developers is the Send to Mobile option (introduced earlier) - if your app has Facebook integration, then Send to Mobile will display a notification in users' Facebook app, to download and install your app.

Finally, the Facebook post reiterates that the company has also rolled out a mobile Like button, which can be integrated into third mobile apps, to make it easier for users to like your content on Facebook. This has been rolled out for iOS in beta right now, and a broader rollout, including Android availability, is planned soon.