It’s Now Possible To Tag A Facebook Page From A Third-Party Platform

Finally. Well, almost.

For years, social media managers who depend on third-party platforms to schedule posts have begged for a way to tag other Facebook Pages in posts, just like they always have been able to do with @mentions on Twitter.

Anyone wanting to make those tagging connections — and Facebook signaled in February that tagging other Pages could improve the reach of posts — needed to post natively on the social network.

Facebook eventually enabled native scheduling but it’s still an awkward process and for anyone trying to efficiently manage a social effort, the limitation on third-party tagging is frustrating. Fixing the issue remains the most popular suggestion on HootSuite’s help forum.

The sticking point has always been Facebook’s Graph API, which didn’t give third-party developers access to the tagging engine, but earlier this month Facebook cleared the path with an API update:

Pages are able to mention other Pages in posts published via the API. If you want to publish mentions of pages other than those managed by your app’s developers, you’ll need to submit for review by Facebook.

And PerfectPost, a social publishing platform that works mostly with direct marketers and ecommerce firms, appears to be the first to enable the feature. Perfect CEO and founder Rob Kischuk emailed us with a screen shot of the evidence:

The feature is available now to all PerfectPost customers (the starting price is $499 a month).

Kirshuk said his team began working on the update soon after Facebook announced the change. It took about a week of work before submitting to Facebook for approval.

Now that PostPerfect has proven it can be done, it’s likely that the rest of the third-party players will follow suit.