Connecting Facebook groups and troubleshooting connections
Meta is shutting down its Facebook Groups API as of April 22, 2024 and Buffer will no longer be able to automatically post to Facebook Groups on your behalf.
While direct publishing to Facebook Groups is no longer supported by Meta, Buffer will continue to seamlessly facilitate scheduling your posts with mobile notifications.
With notification based publishing, you can create your post in Buffer, receive a notification on your mobile device when it’s time to post, then tap the notification and copy your post over to your Facebook group to finish posting.
Learn more about how this works here.
Because we’re not posting automatically for you, the connection process for Facebook groups is slightly different than other channels. This guide will walk you through the steps to connect your group to Buffer and share some good to knows when using notification publishing.
Connecting your Facebook Group
- First, open the Facebook group you want to connect to Buffer and copy its URL (you’ll need this later!)
- In another tab, head to https://account.buffer.com/channels or follow these steps: Open Buffer, click on your profile avatar at the top right of your dashboard, and click Account > Channels.
- Click on Connect next to Facebook.
- Select “Facebook group” and click Start Connecting.
- Next, enter the name of your Facebook group and the group URL (it should look something like this: facebook.com/groups/xxxxxx), then type Next.
- We’ll remind you one more time that we aren’t able to post automatically for you. You can read through the information and the click Got it once you’re done.
- That’s it! You’ve successfully connected your Facebook Group to Buffer and can start scheduling posts.
Must-reads
- In order to use notification publishing with Facebook groups, you’ll need to download the latest version of the Buffer app (available on iOS and Android).
- Notifications within the Buffer app are channel specific, so you’ll still need to set up notifications for Facebook even if you’ve set up notifications for Instagram.
- Facebook pages and groups are still linked in the composer, so if you schedule a post for a Facebook group and a Facebook page, the Facebook page post will get scheduled to publish automatically and the Facebook group post will be scheduled as a notification.
Publishing your post
When it’s time to post, you’ll receive a notification on your phone that you can tap to open and copy your post over to Facebook to finish publishing.
For a step by step guide on the process, check out Using notification publishing.