Is it possible to get a list of statistics/analytics for all the links shared using a server-side Facebook application via the Facebook API?
I have a list of links that can be shared to Facebook using the appId defined in my server app. In order to refresh the share count of those items, I'm currently calling:
http://graph.facebook.com/{MY_URL}
whenever I want to update those values.
Obviously, this solution is not very scalable, because the number of items constantly grows so I can't call the method on all the URLs in sequence. Alternatively, this information can be fetched every time it needs to be visualized to the users. However, this can mean that the same request will be made to Facebook API in quick succession even though the chances of anything changing are small.
Ideally, I would like to get a list of all the links/items shared using my application with the share count for each of them. This way I can do a nightly update of all the values without going one by one.
I'm using the
me/links
API method to share the links to Facebook.
Analytics of a post, shared by a page can be accessed by the Insights API
Below id the Graph API call to access the count of clicks sent to your domain by a certain post.
/v2.4/<object-id>/insights/domain_feed_clicks?period=lifetime
If this is not what you're looking for, please refer to the permalink mentioned above and find the metric which best suits your need.
I would like to get a list of all the links/items shared using my application
The API does not provide that kind of list.
To reduce the number of API requests you have to make, you can request the data for several URLs in one go though: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/using-graph-api/v2.4#multirequests
https://graph.facebook.com/?ids=http://example.com/foo,http://example.com/bar,…
(You should properly URL-encode any URLs you use a parameter values here of course.)
Related
I'm using Facebook graph Api to search users and data that i get is kinda different from that i get from Facebook UI. For example search response of User interface is friends, mutual friends and other related data in first. How can i query to get related data for current user ( i.e friends and mutual friends in first place).
Here is query that i'm using to search users.
https://graph.facebook.com/v2.5/search?fields=id,name,picture.type(normal)&limit=50&q={q}&type=user&access_token={token}
and data that i get is kinda different from that i get from Facebook UI
That’s because those are two completely different things.
The search functionality offered via the UI is called Graph Search. But the powerful possibilities that offers are not exposed via API. (To protect user privacy, and keep apps from doing extended user profiling via that data.)
Searching via API is limited to what is listed here: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/using-graph-api/#search
That’s not much – but it’s all you get.
I want to get all the newest posts from 10 (or let's say 1xxxxx) Facebook pages (which I do not own) as soon as they there published without manual refreshing all 10 pages every second. What legal tools should I use?
Use the Facebook Graph API. It allows you to get your application notified via callback HTTP posts whenever certain updates occur. You'll find the API documentation for this feature here:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/real-time-updates/v2.2
Based on your usage, you may have to pay for that service.
I am building a social application, users post data to the website, which is saved in our database.
This creates a record on the site, which is searchable and creates the basic content and function of the site (the purpose is not relevant at this point)
When a record is saved to our database, I want to "spread the word" and send this data out to social networks. Currently, I'm looking at Facebook in isolation.
So, I know how to create a post through the Graph API and post this content to the users Timeline, or indeed to a business page associated with the APP/Website.. but I am not sure how, or if indeed one should, maintain continuity.
What I mean... if a user creates a record on my website, and then the website/App creates a post on my business page, and also asks the user to post it in their Timeline, how do I stop this being two separate posts, and instead one post which has been shared?
I want to achieve:
User posts on website
>
Website posts to Page
>
Post on Page is "Shared" to users Timeline
As opposed to:
User posts on website
>
Website posts to Page
>
Website posts an additional post to users Timeline
The reason I want to do this, is that on the website, I want to be able to show shares, likes and comments from Facebook by tracking the ID of the initial post created when first entered onto my website.
Or am I trying to reinvent the wheel and should just use Facebook's comment plugin?
When you create the post on facebook on the Page, store the returned post ID in your data model.
From what I can tell, there is no way to access the normal user share directly through the API. If you insist on doing it programmatically without popping up any dialog for your user, you can make a post to the user's page which has (the start of) the Page post and a linkback to the Page post as an attachment. This is probably to prevent abuse.
However, if you don't mind relying on an undocumented and deprecated endpoint, you can use the old sharer.php endpoint, so long as you have a fully qualified link to the post you want to share (you can retrieve the url through the api). This will also require your user to enter anything appropriate in their share and then click "share."
The endpoint is
http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php
Call it with the u parameter filled in with the url, so
http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=[URL encoded URL of the post you wanted to call]
You can try this with any facebook post (go to a post, copy the url, past in as the parameter), it's still working (I just tried it) but there are no guarantees. See the top answer to Facebook API: "Share" a post already posted on a page's wall?.
You can still access likes, comments, etc for that post id through the Graph API (and you can provide your users a direct link to the post). Cache/update them as recommended and display them on your own page. You are basically mirroring back onto your own site what is happening on facebook in regards to the post you made.
I would go this route especially if you are at all planning on branching into other services. That way you can do an aggregated display of statistics/likes/etc from the multiple services you are having your platform repost to. This is also good for (at least an impression of) data integrity for your users: they know that your service represents everything they have done in case anything happens to their facebook/etc accounts.
This could especially be noteworthy if they are worried about facebook/etc deleting any of their posts, or for recovering from any issues where a post/comment/etc is not properly stored by facebook/etc (for example, comments have a maximum length which, at least via the main FB UI, silently drops anything above the maximum length in a non recoverable way for the user).
I've got a question that I just can't find out the answer to.
I am working on an application in which users can share content through facebook, however they are only allowed to share each piece of content once and once only.
I need to find a way (Without storing share data locally in a database somewhere) to get the amount of unique shares for a URL. Can this be done using the facebook API? Or would I need to use a facebook application as a middlepoint to make sure people can't share more than once?
You surely cant do this using Facebook API
You can only get the number of shares for a url by -
For eg. to findout the number of shares for the url http://yahoo.com
http://graph.facebook.com/?id=http://yahoo.com
Not sure whether the number of shares returned by this method are unique or not
I have an application that is retrieving data from Facebook. Users authorize the application to read and write to their pages, and we read their data and post to it from our application. All interaction occurs via the PHP interface that Facebook supplies.
For the last few months our application has been performing this task flawlessly. However in recent days we have started noticing an issue with certain pages.
We go out and retrieve data for a specific page, and we no longer get any data. Instead Facebook returns us an empty result. This obviously causes problems in our application which needs to read this data.
We can still write data just fine.
I am at a point where I'm not sure what this could be. Any common scenarios or recent Graph API issues that could cause this?
This sounds odd. The only thing that comes to mind is that the page owner has put a restriction on the audience for their page, which would then require you to pass in an access token to access data about the page. An example would be a beer company that wants to limit access to their FB page to users that are older than 21. Since there is a restriction on who can access the page content, we enforce that restriction on the FB platform. In this case you would need to pass in the access_token of a user who is 21 or older to access the page details via the graph api.
Adding to Jeff's answer, I found that any kind of restriction whatsoever will return a blank data object. I was banging my head on every single setting on my company's page and found that we had it set to only show in certain countries (Manage Settings > Country Restrictions). Removing all of them from the list started to return all the data we needed.