What’s Happening?
Meta (Facebook’s parent company) notified us that they will be removing support for the limited-use business token data field in Facebook APIs that was available to a select number of partners, including Khoros. Partners have until December 31, 2021 to stop using the data field or risk having API failures. Khoros plans to discontinue use of this field by December 15, 2021.
What Does this Mean for You?
Today, in both our Marketing and Care products, we use the limited-use business token data field I to identify when the same user (despite potentially different unique IDs) interacts across multiple of a customer's Facebook pages. In doing so, customers have the ability to map out a user's interaction history across any of their pages.
Khoros uses the business token data field in the Facebook integration for our Care and Marketing platform in order to map a single user who interacts with multiple Facebook Pages owned by the same brand. This allows us to provide your agents the ability to view related conversations by the same user across all Pages for the brand.
With the removal of this data field from the APIs, we are no longer able to relate conversations from the same user across different Pages because Facebook APIs provide a unique user ID (called Page Scoped IDs, or PSIDs in short) for each Page where the user interacts. As such, there is no way to reconcile these unique IDs back to the same user.
Once the change goes into effect, we will no longer be able to show conversations by the user from different Pages as related conversation history in our UI. Note that this impacts only new users, those that have not previously contacted you, and content posted to new Pages. Existing users that were already mapped using the data field will not be affected. Also, any conversations by a user on a single Page will still be properly identified as related by virtue of the unique PSID for that user corresponding to that Page.
What are Next Steps?
We understand that this change might impact the way your agents interact with the Facebook users within the Khoros platform, depending on the number of users that regularly interact with multiple pages of yours. While we cannot change the fact that Meta is removing the data field from the APIs, we welcome your feedback on the impact that this will have on your operations, so that we can share it back with Meta. We also encourage you to share the same with your Facebook representative. As always, we are here to advocate on your behalf for solutions that meet your needs.
