FaceBook Action Links Policy Changed.

Notes

As we recently discovered the hard way (reading complaints of RSS Graffiti users), Facebook has changed its policy about Story Action Links to the stricter.

In short, only one custom Action Link is now allowed to be added to each story published on a wall and it can be up to 25 characters long in text. Any further Action Links submitted by applications will be ignored. This is applied immediately and is effective for all Stream Stories, new and old ones. Any previous stories published by applications will only show one Action Link, (whichever was first in the list), regardless of how many where originally included and there is no way to change that. Furthermore application developers are advised not to try to add further action links within the body or title part of stories.

We were a bit surprised to discover this change because if there was any announcement on this change we certainly must have missed it. It sure affects most Facebook applications possibly much more than it affects RSS Graffiti.

After this change, we did not have much choice left for RSS Graffiti. We had to choose between “Share” and “Full Story” as our one and only custom Action Link. And since there was already a way to direct the users to the full story by clicking on the story’s title or thumbnail, we picked “Share”. By the way we really do believe that a “Share” action link should have be added by Facebook together with the Like/Unlike action links and we really do look forward for Facebook to natively supporting this feature.

Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about the stories already posted, because we had submitted “Share” as the last Action Link, to make it more prominent. This link has now disappeared after this Facebook policy update.

Following you can find a short description of the new Action Links policy on Facebook as it appears on the developers WiKi…

Action Link Guidelines

Please observe the following guidelines for using action links in your Feed stories.

An action link is a succinct verb phrase that describes a contextual action.
- OK: “Become a fan”
- Not OK: “Are you a fan of Radiohead?”
An action link must start with a verb.
Each action link can contain only one verb.
- OK: “Watch the video”
- Not OK: “Watch the video and win a prize”
Action links cannot be deceptive.
Action links should not include unnecessary punctuation or formatting characters.
- Not OK: “Watch the video!!”
- Not OK: “Watch the video (you will love it)”
- Not OK: “[ Join Us! ]”
As a rule of thumb, action links should be 3 words or less.
Do not include calls to action in the Feed story body or headline.
A Feed story can contain only one action link with a max of 25 characters.