Khoros has been investigating old posts from Facebook being auto-imported into Khoros Social Marketing Calendar and Analytics. The old posts have created confusion for customers in calendar as well as altered analytics metrics.
After thorough investigation, we determined that this is a bug on Facebook’s side. We have been in active discussions with Facebook the last several months and are working with them to engineer a solution. While Facebook has acknowledged the bug, they have not offered a timetable for a fix.
We have therefore designed a workaround, implemented today, to counteract the negative impacts and remove old posts from your Calendar and Analytics. Please see below for details:
- Expected activity: Old posts would not auto-import into the Calendar or Analytics unless edits are done natively.
- Actual activity: Old post copies are auto-importing into Calendar and Analytics as new posts.
- Cause: Certain actions taken (such as testing Boost) within Facebook natively appears to be "creating" new Object ID's; effectively copying the old post and making a new one out of it. These duplicates appear to be temporary and are not accessible natively or via the API after a period of time passes.
- Workaround: We are identifying duplicate, old posts to then mark as deleted. Once marked, duplicates will no longer be visible in the Calendar and Analytics reporting. The workaround will only impact auto-imported items.
- What do customers need to do: Nothing; duplicate, old posts will be identified and removed by Khoros automatically.
- Workaround effective date: August 26th, 2019
- Retroactive effective date: May 26th, 2019
- How this impacts Analytics:
- Import of old posts has been inflating the number of published posts in Marketing Analytics exports and dashboards, and as a result, deflating engagement rates, for example, by increasing the numerator.
- Going forward this fix will identify and archive the posts, removing them from dashboard widgets and counts as well as within the Post export. This will decrease previous published post counts and improve engagement rate as these posts are no longer counted within the calculation. This will apply to the retroactive time range back to May 26, 2019.
Additional Notes:
Until the bug is resolved on Facebook’s end, we will continue this workaround to identify and remove duplicate, old posts. This means that old items may be present in the Calendar for up to an hour prior to removal. If you need to manually remove any posts, use the “bulk delete” option in the calendar list view.
While we are marking old posts as deleted and removing them from view, we are not permanently deleting anything from Khoros or natively. Posts will still be archived in Khoros.
Support:
If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to our Support Team or contact your Customer Success Manager.
We appreciate your patience with Khoros we as bring resolution to this matter.
