Facebook removes “via” post attribution

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A flurry of articles and blog posts recently revealed Facebook’s intentions of removing the post attribution for third-party social media software. No idea what that means? Its OK! We’ll explain it here as part of our “in plain english” series.

So, what’s a post attribution? When someone posts to Facebook using an “app,” Facebook tells anyone looking at the post which app it came from with an “attribution.” These “apps” could be a social media platform like SocialMadeSimple or Hootsuite, a music app like Spotify or a news reader like The Washington Post. This used to appear in the form of text, reading “via SocialMadeSimple,” for example (shown on the right).

Many people and businesses use apps in order to keep more active on social networks. However, we often heard from our customers that they didn’t like this “attribution” as they felt it made their posts look like there were advertising – or that the posts weren’t original.