Facebook Is Deprecating Its Hashtag Search API

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As TNW reports, Facebook has made changes to its Hashtags API in order to prevent apps from searching and retrieving public posts from profiles that contain hashtags.

Also Read: LinkedIn Restricts Access To Its APIs

The news were first reported by Tint, a content curation tool for social media. In its email to its client, Tint stated that the API would be dropped from its product, as it started returning errors. According to the same email, Facebook has scheduled to deprecate the API on April, 30th.

The social network confirmed the information, stating that developers will no longer process public posts that contain hashtags, after numerous complaints from members over the way information was shared on the social network.

If you’re a developer and you want to use the specific API, there are two ways to obtain valuable data:

– Through Facebook’s Media Solutions API which will return the number (only the number) of hashtag posts. The access to this API is restricted to developers working on solution for media companies.
– Through Datasift, a service that gives developers and apps the option to search for hashtags and receive anonymized and aggregated information from Facebook.

Facebook is closing down its hashtags API – see how this may affect you

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What does this mean for marketers? This update may seem trivia, but it may cause serious disruptions to various social media tools that you may be using to track down hashtags. If you have been tracking down specific users, then this should not be available to you by end of April. Most social media search and analysis tools will probably update their API calls and comply with the new rules, however, it’s always good to run a check and adjust your reporting process.