Despite all the tweaks and changes, the focus on video, on being live; Facebook is still a great place to share links. Whether it’s a how to guide, your latest blog post or 7 reasons why avocados make life better, sharing relevant and interesting web links with your Facebook fans can be a great way to drive web traffic and keep your community engaged.

Until very recently, Facebook made this easy. Not only could you share a link, but you could customise every aspect of it. Not keen on the image that was automatically pulled through? No problem, just upload a different one. Want to change the focus from the official title? Easy, just edit the headline and copy in a few clicks.

Not any more. In an effort to shut down fake news, Facebook have removed the ability to edit links. If you’ve got a good website and you’re careful about completing the meta data for each page accurately with well-labelled images you won’t have a problem. If you’ve got an older site that limits how much you can edit things you’re probably already having some issues.

We wrote about this back in July, to warn people what was coming. Check out our guide to how this affects you and what you can do about it here.

Understandably, Facebook have received a lot of complaints about this. As a result, Facebook has now announced that publishers will be able to use a new option called ‘Link Ownership’ which will enable them to keep editing their links as normal.

For publishers, the Link Ownership option will appear in the Publishing Tools section of your Facebook Page – but note, this only applies to media publishers. The bad news is that your average Facebook page will not see this option. The good news is that Facebook are trialling how this goes and are likely to extend a version of it to all pages at some point.

(Image via Matt Navarra/Mari Smith)

So fret not, it looks likely we will all be able to edit links again at some level in the future. And in the meantime it’s a good reason to look closely at your website – how do links appear with no editing? Can this be improved? Are they doing your business justice? Remember, most people are lazy and won’t edit links anyway so it always pays to make sure your metadata is as up to date and accurate as possible.