Brand pages have had the Offers tool in Facebook for quite some time now. It’s a great way to connect with fans by offering them free or discounted items for a limited time. The social network announced two major updates to Offers last week. Now Facebook is offering tips on how to best implement them.
First and foremost, brand pages can now send QR codes or barcodes alongside their Facebook offers. It will allow brands to keep track of who is actually using the offers and how widespread the campaign gets.
The second change is a bit more controversial. Facebook will now be requiring brand pages to create an ad alongside the offer. In essence, offers are no longer free. On the development side of things, Facebook says the “scheduled_publish_time” and the “published” paramaters will be silently ignored from now on. For more information on how to implement the changes in the Offers API, check out Facebook’s documentation.
Developers should also be wary of the breaking changes going into effect on October 3. Starting next week, Facebook will stop allowing developers to use Custom Open Graph “like” and “follow” actions. Developers will have to switch to the built-in “like” and “follow” actions available in the Graph API. They are also removing the bookmark URL as developers can now use the “ref” parameter to track referrals.
Others changes include the removal of the “offline_access” permission and the Live Stream plugin. The Live Stream plugin will be replaced by the Comments Box plugin starting October 3. Facebook is also replacing the summary field with the description field and removing the “position” field for photos. Finally, Facebook will now return a dictionary when developers access to the /picture connection.
As for the weekly bug count, Facebook says that 210 bugs were reported since last week. Out of those, 33 were accepted and 24 were fixed. Check out the blog post for the full list of fixes.
