If your Facebook feed isn’t updating then it could be due to one of the following reasons:
1) Posts are shared to your Facebook Page from a user’s Personal Profile or a non-public Facebook Page
If your Facebook feed doesn’t appear to be showing the most recent posts, or if some posts which are shared to your Facebook page are missing, then the most likely explanation is that those posts in your feed may be shared from a user’s personal Facebook profile or a Facebook page which has an age or location restriction on it. Facebook’s privacy policy doesn’t allow posts that you share from personal profiles or non-public pages to be shared outside of Facebook as the posts don’t technically belong to your page, they belong to the user who posted it to their personal profile or to the non-public page that posted it. There’s an example of a post shared from a user’s personal profile below. Posts from non-public Facebook pages can’t be displayed as they have an age or location restriction on them which prevent them from being publicly accessible via Facebook’s API.
Please note, this isn’t a limitation of our plugin, it’s a restriction which Facebook places on it’s content in order to protect the privacy of their users.
Potential solutions
- You could re-post the content to your page rather than sharing it to your page. If you re-post the content as your own post on your Facebook page then the content now originates from your Facebook page and will be displayed in the feed on your website.
- If you were to share a post from another Facebook page or public source, rather than sharing it from someone’s personal profile or a restricted page, then it would show up in your feed outside of Facebook, but by default any posts that originate from a personal profile are protected by Facebook’s privacy policy and are the private content of that profile owner.
2) Some posts are being filtered out
Check that you have all of the post types selected in the following location: Facebook Feed > Customize > Post Types, or that you aren’t excluding some post types in the shortcode itself, using the type option.
Check that you don’t have a “filter” set on the feed which is only showing posts that contain certain words or phrases. The filter setting is in the following location: Facebook Feed > Customize > Filter Content by String, or you may be using the filter shortcode option.
3) The missing posts are set to have an audience restriction
When you create a post you can select to only show it to a preferred audience (screenshot). If you select this option then the post will no longer be publicly visible and so Facebook won’t allow it to be displayed outside of their platform. In order for the post to be displayed in our plugin you would need to remove any audience restrictions so that it’s “Public”. You can tell whether a post is public as it will have a “globe” icon at the top:
If it has a “gear” icon, then it means there is a custom audience restriction on the post:
4) You may be using a caching plugin with aggressive settings
See this FAQ for more information.
