UPDATE: 7/14/15 It appears Hootsuite has listened and has turned Hootlet’s auto-populate functionality back on for Twitter user profiles. Facebook profiles will continue to no longer auto-populate a summary and link automatically due to the Facebook API Platform Policy 2.3. Read below for details.
Today Hootsuite rolled out a huge change to their Hootlet app.
They stopped auto populating the dialogue box with the Link Title and Summary. Look what happens when you try to use Hootlet to tweet a page.
You get a “Your message cannot be empty” response.
Previously when you used Hootlet to send a page or url it would auto populate with the link of the URL and summary of the article. You would just select your profile and hit send now or autoschedule.
Not anymore.
Why did Hootsuite suddenly stop doing this with their Hootlet feature?
“In order to ensure quality content is posted, Facebook requires that messages posted to Facebook be fully user generated, and not pre-filled with any content that the user did not write themselves. ”
Fine, Facebook is not allowing companies or people to simply repost content from the web easily.
I get that.
HOWEVER, if you use Hootsuite’s Hootlet for Twitter you are out of luck too! Because even if you are going to Tweet something (and not use a FB user profile) it won’t auto-populate with the summary or url.
That all being said, you can use the “Preview Generation box in the lower right hand side” and manually cut and paste all that information.
Dear Hootsuite, Nobody got time for that.
This feature was great if you were using a curating service like Feedly to source your Twitter content for your client’s Twitter accounts.
It looks like Facebook wins and is affecting Twitter in the process. Nice move Facebook.
Hopefully enough people will send the message to Hootsuite that they need to set up a workaround for this now missing auto-populate function on the Twitter profiles. We love Hootsuite, it’s one of the best scheduling tools for social media out there.
We love you.
Until then…
Go here to read Hootsuite’s explanation of the missing functionality.
https://help.hootsuite.com/hc/en-us/articles/205176120?hootPostID=78b76b5ac863319974788cae0c4b7cf6