If your ski area is auto-tweeting photos from Facebook, all of those links are broken.
Gregg Blanchard /
For a while now some links auto-tweeted by Facebook pages that have been linked to a Twitter account are broken.
To be clear, this is on Facebook’s end, not Twitter’s or the resort’s.
But because so much content is shared this way (18% of all resort tweets are auto-tweeted from Facebook) I wanted to provide a quick update of what I know. As far as I can tell, it effects photos uploaded directly to your page.
Shared Content
Sort of odd, but that means sharing someone else’s post (even if it’s a photo) works fine (it creates this which links back to this).
Links
Sharing a link is fine (it creates this which links to this).
Videos
And uploading a video is fine (it creates this which links to this).
Photos
But let’s say you share a photo like this one:
It would create a tweet like this:
Shout out to Canada's golden ladies Penny Oleksiak and Rosie Mclean. You are CANADA PRIDE.
(With Rosie's… https://t.co/Q7MAuGUJvg
— Sunshine Village (@SunshineVillage) August 18, 2016
That would link to this:
Every once in a while I think I’ve found an exception. But after digging it all seems to come down to whether Facebook viewed that post as a photo or not.
If it views it as just a photo, the links are broken. If it views it as something like an update with a link that had a photo attached to it after the link was pasted into the share box, those links appear to be fine.
(Maybe) Desktop Only
As if this needed another twist, it appears to be only impacting desktop clicks. For exapmle:
This tweet from Brighton…
But your season pass at Pass-A-Palooza this Saturday and cop a pair of these extremely limited edition @dangshades https://t.co/12RxC6xfZz
— BrightonResort (@BrightonResort) August 18, 2016
Looks like this on desktop:
But this on mobile:
I’m not 100% confident in saying it’s desktop only, but from a handful of links I tested while writing this it appears to be the case. Strange.
One More Point
This is not the fault of marketers. No one should be thrown under the bus for having these broken links.
I have zero problem with auto-tweets from Facebook. These links get the highest retweet rate and give busy marketers a way to save themselves a few minutes a day for more important things.
But because some of these resorts don’t watch Twitter as closely because of this practice, I wanted to make sure you knew what was happening.
If Facebook provides a fix, I’ll update you as soon as I hear about it.