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New Marketing Tools for Pages

July 23, 2012ByOmid Saadati

Pages are valuable tools for marketing your app or your brand. Recently, we added several powerful features that simplify managing and sponsoring Page posts. All below features are available in both Page admin UI and the API.

Scheduled Page Posts

Many Page admins have requested a way for creating and scheduling page posts to be published at a future time. Now, using Pages Graph API, you can create a page post and schedule it to be published at a future time that is between 10 minutes and 6 months from the time the post is created. If you change your mind about the scheduled publish time of the post, you can change the schedule time or delete the unpublished post so long as the post's original scheduled publish time is at least 3 minutes away. To create scheduled posts using Graph API see Pages Graph API.

Unpublished Page Posts

Another new feature is the ability to create Page posts that don't show on your Page's timeline. Admins frequently want to create Page posts that they can sponsor. However, these Page posts usually contain information that are relevant to only a segment of the Pages's audience, e.g., 50% off all women shoes in all the bay area stores. Moreover, these stories don't contain information that is relevant to the Page's identity and story, which is characteristic of the content that should be on the Page's timeline. Unpublished page posts allow for posts that can be promoted as sponsored Page posts, but they don't show up on the Page's timeline. Such promoted page posts appear only on the right hand side column, and not on the news feed. To create unpublished posts using Graph API see Pages Graph API.

You might ask how you would read a list of all scheduled and unpublished page post through API. Graph API's Page object provides a new connection, promotable_posts, that lists all published, scheduled, and unpublished Page posts. Also, you can use FQL stream table for this purpose as described here.

Page Admin Permissions

Many Page admins use third party tools for Page content creation, moderation, engagement, or ad creation. These use cases require a Page admin to grant permissions for managing the Page to a third party app. However, usually such an app doesn't require full admin permissions. For example, imagine an ads management platform that creates page posts sponsored stories and monitors Pages' insights. Such an app requires permissions for managing ads for the page and reading the page's insights, but it doesn't need permissions for creating page posts and monitoring posts' comments. The Page admin can add the admin of the ads platform as a Page admin with Ads Creator permission. Then, the Page's access token that the ads management platform receives, will be granted with only managing ads and reading insights permissions for the page. To learn about Page admin permissions see here.

To get started using these new APIs see Pages Graph API.