Back in 2011, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg introduced his dream of real-time sharing to one’s Facebook newsfeed via the apps they used. The idea was to connect a person’s Facebook timeline to their favorite apps and sync the two together to receive automatic updates as to what the person was doing. Unfortunately for him, it seems Mr. Zuckerberg has given up on this dream.
As per the release of Facebook’s latest update, automatic social sharing via apps will no longer spam the timeline of users. This update comes after Facebook noticed that a lot of users were marking such auto-posted stories as spam. Consequently, Facebook’s news feeds algorithm started showing less and less of such stories, after which the rate of users marking them as spam dropped down to about 75%.
So, what does this mean for the developers of web and mobile applications that incorporate the option of social media sharing within their apps? Simply put, Facebook is encouraging such developers to disable auto-sharing in their apps as its constantly updated algorithm will neutralize it anyway. Of course, this is not a hard and fast rule; if developers still wish to enable auto-sharing within their apps, it is their choice. However, Facebook has warned that implicit sharing is no longer going to help app developers grow the app’s user base as it once did.
Should developers take Facebook’s advice and stop the commonly accepted practice of implementing auto-sharing to Facebook’s newsfeed then? That depends. Most users tend to feel surprised or annoyed by stories showing up on their feeds implicitly or automatically. However; certain apps like Spotify that implement collections on Facebook profiles are exempt from this rule.
The bottom line is, if your app has the ability to amass a collection of music, images, videos or other multi-media on a person’s Facebook profile, you might want to keep auto-sharing enabled. If on the other hand, your app does not fall under this category, auto-sharing is not really going to help you much.