Facebook updates Graph, Messenger, and Marketing APIs to 4.0
Facebook has updated three of its most important APIs to version 4, bringing some important changes to be aware of.
While the version number indicates a large release, it’s worth noting that Facebook is transitioning to major numbers for all new versions. The change in numbering aligns the version numbers of Facebook’s SDKs with the version of the API.
Pages API – Facebook now requires one of the following permissions for an app to access the pages associated with a user or media owner:
Page Public Content Access – Apps that had been temporarily approved for Page Public Content Access must undergo App Review.
Webhooks – A couple of changes have been made to webhooks in Graph API 4:
Backend improvements which Facebook promises will improve performance and result in fewer duplicate notifications.
The webhooks field for Page Feed has been deprecated. Applications must now use the reactions webhook to retrieve page likes.
The largest number of changes have been made to Facebook’s Marketing API. Here’s a rundown of what you need to know:
Business Asset Groups – The feature will be fully available on August 14th, along with additional documentation. Businesses can more easily group and manage permissions for assets.
Ad creation and editing improvements – Post-processing has been improved so that ads creation and editing is more resilient to transient errors. After a request is received, there is a new ads run status IN_PROCESS which means Facebook is processing the ad object.
More detailed breakdown of ad insights – Insights data can now be grouped by mobile web and mobile app. Previously, insights showed all mobile data together regardless of whether it came from mobile web or mobile app traffic.
New error type in issues_info – The error type can be soft or hard. Hard errors block delivery, and Facebook will set your ad to WITH_ISSUES. Soft errors do not block ads delivery.
Only second to WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger is one of the world’s most popular messaging services. Here are the changes in v4 of its API:
Deprecated features – Some features have been deprecated in this release:
Location Quick Reply Button - deprecated for all versions on October 29, 2019
Share Button - deprecated for all versions on October 29, 2019
Messenger Codes - deprecated for all versions on October 29, 2019
Vertical List Template
Open Graph Template
Deprecated API – As of 4.0, the Broadcast API is also being deprecated. Facebook recommends using the Send API with the NON_PROMOTIONAL_SUBSCRIPTION message tag to achieve the same outcome.
M.me links open the 24hr window within existing threads – If an individual engages with a m.me link that contains a ref parameter and is taken into an existing thread, it will now open the 24hr standard messaging window. This will allow apps powering Pages to reply to people based on the context that the ref parameter provides.
While this is a rundown of the biggest changes, the full Graph API 4.0 changelog is available here.
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