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If you share a photo on msn?

When you share a photo on Path to FB, why does it no longer post as an organically placed photo on FB anymore?

  • It now just shows up as a line item "Person X has posted a photo on Path," instead of the photo actually coming up in-stream.

  • Answer:

    They are probably A/B testing this as I just shared a photo to FB and it showed up as in your words an "organic" photo. Path recently hired somebody I know and I believe part of their job is growth. Strangely enough I am working on figuring out what the share on FB experience should be for another mobile app, so I'll share my own experience and thoughts. Sharing on FB is both a content distribution and user acquisition channel. Distribution: Lets assume the average facebook user has 150 friends [1], and for each photo shared you'll get a large number of impressions out of this. So great distribution. User acquisition: Based on the data I've looked at Open Graph photo shares with User Generated Photos (the large format you're talking about) get ~4 clicks per share, where the click leads to the photo viewer experience within facebook itself. The value of these clicks are rather low given there is no chance to driver users back to your site to acquire them, and I suspect most users don't understand app attribution given its relatively low prominence: You have two options to drive users back to your site and try and convert them: Add text in the description to link back to your site, this is difficult because facebook's TOS doesn't allow you to pre-fill the comment section for your users. For example instagram can only append a link back to their site if users fill in their own comments first, ex: Post in a manner that links back to your site, I haven't seen the posted a photo on Path update you're talking about but I'm surpised it's not done as a opengraph post w/o user geneated photos, you still get context/preview ex: So Path is probably trying to balance user experience with growth opportunities. [1]

Richard Chen at Quora Visit the source

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I can only assume here. Maybe Morin or someone else from Path can confirm it. Some people use Path as a beautiful sharing frontend for Twitter/FB/tumblr/4sq. This is not what Path was intended for. Sharing to Twitter resulted in a link to a public Path moment  before. It could be that they simply streamlined this experience to Facebook. Path isn't just another client for other platforms. It is a platform itself. Sharing to other services was most likely implemented to increase usage. Not through giving user a good tool to upload images to Facebook but to refer friends of the person to Path. Maybe they compared how many signups they got from path moments shared on Twitter and photos that got natively uploaded to Facebook with Path only in the album name and as source. I assume that not too many people realized what Path is. I am not even sure if they understood that the photos were uploaded with Path. The switch to open graph actions is in line with the goals of Path. I think this was the right decision to make. It will upset some users and may result in less usage but if Path hadn't done that people would use it in ways it wasn't intended. That would interfere with their message. If someone only wants to upload photos to Facebook there are many apps out there to do that. For example Facebooks own 'Camera'.

Luca Hammer

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