I am developing a page on my site that pulls in analytics data from Facebook posts and pages, and have began with trying out the PHP SDK for Facebook.
The documentation seems to have improved in the last few months since the last time I used it, but as there is so much going on, I find it difficult to find the exact answer to my questions sometimes.
I want to get the analytics data for a number of posts and pages which are not necessarily related to each other... and also want to do this without logging in via Facebook. Is there some sort of simple API key I can use, which skips the logging in stage? I want a number of different peple to go to the site and see info from a number of different posts and pages.
Hope this makes sense.
You'll be able to get limited data from public pages and posts without logging in. Data includes number of likes, public page information, comment and likes on posts etc.
For example, if I look at the following Page https://graph.facebook.com/thetimberyard, I can see various stats like:
checkins
talking_about_count
were_here_count
likes
However, you can get better insights if you ask the user to login with read_insights permission. This permission will give you access to full insights for pages you own. Extra insights include (but not limited to):
Daily New Likes
Daily Unlikes
Daily Non/Logged-in Page Views
Weekly Non/Logged-in Page Views
Daily Internal Referrers
Daily External Referrers
Daily/Weekly/Monthly People Talking About This
Daily/Weekly/Monthly Reach Demographics, etc.
Related
I'm trying to create a small recommendation system based on what pages people like in Facebook. This is how it will work:
someone will login with Facebook
accept the terms to retrieve information
then the program should get all pages this user liked
Concern
Since I have all the liked pages from a user, which page should be the most relevant for recommendation?
I was trying the Graph API Explorer from Facebook to get all my likes or even comments made to posts of a page that I liked, so with that I could count and prioritise the pages in my program.
However I thought this should be a security issue and after testing I confirmed that was not working (user access tokens permissions were selected correctly for this test).
Questions
Is there a way to make this work?
Should I use another solution?
I'm trying to figure out how to get the total number of comments, posts, likes and fans for any given Facebook fan page and date range using the Facebook API's. I need to be able to do this without the user having to log into Facebook to give the app permissions. This does seem to be possible, as this site is able to do it https://app.conversocial.com/profiler/ .But I don't know how they are doing it.
I've looked into the 'insights' fql table, but this always seems to return empty results. And I've also looked into the 'link_stats' fql table but this doesn't allow a date range to be set.
Does anyone have any idea on how to do this?
You are right. What they are doing is not possible by using the normal Graph API or/and the FQL.
However, Facebook also provides support for two other APIs:
Public Feed API
Keyword Insights API
Access to these APIs is restricted to a limited set of media publishers and usage requires prior approval by Facebook.
I think that they are using the Public Feed API. The documentation of the Public Feed API lists some of the publishers that have been using this API and the site you've mentioned in the question is not in the list. The documentation also doesn't mention anything about getting the Page Insights, but I think it might support this feature (as I see no other way of doing it).
Or, they might be using any other such restricted API which is not yet available to the public and not even documented on the developers website, but is currently in beta/testing phase.
To get the number of fans and the talkabout count, just query the appropriate Open graph ID for the relevant page. For example, for Coca Cola (https://www.facebook.com/cocacola) this is done via
https://graph.facebook.com/40796308305
To get all public infos (Posts etc) use the following request
https://graph.facebook.com/40796308305/feed?access_token={ACCESS_TOKEN}
where {ACCESS_TOKEN} can either be an App Access Token or a personal one. Consider that you can only see public entries.
The ability to query the date ranges is not provided via Facebook ad far as I know. I guess the https://app.conversocial.com/profiler/ application queries each page that is in its index once a day, and saves the results. That's how they're able to provide historical data.
You can try with the following FQL queries or graph API requests for facebook pages,
Graph API
http://graph.facebook.com/nb4cinema
FQL
SELECT name,about,description, fan_count,talking_about_count FROM page WHERE username= 'stackoverflowpage'
In case of FQL tables:
To read the page table you need
no access_token to get public information, or information about public pages that are not demographically restricted.
any valid access_token to get all information about a page that the current session user is able to see.
We have a test fan page. This has poor figures (<10 fans). Statistics are not available due to the lack of fans and likes on that page.
Allthough, conversocial spits out some statistics. They mixed fans and likes to some extent and so my impression is, that they simply parse the page code in order to get what you see.
I know pretty well that this topic has been discussed very intensively (I read a lot all over the day).
Still, how probable is it that FB might allow me to create a frontend crawler for a non-commercial, non-public research university project?
My crawler should repeatedly lookup a very limited number of specific public fan pages and collect anonymized data like number of fans, status updates and their number of likes and number of comments each.
What I would like to show is what kind of topics in media pages are "liked" and discussed most and how that develops over time. I know about FB's restricted TOS. Thanks for your opinion on that.
The second question concerns technological approach / authorization: Reading a fan page's number of fans, status updates and their number of likes each - could I even use the API/OpenGraph for such a crawler? I think for reading page walls, you need an access token at any cost, and realizing an automatic "crawler" via an application therefore is not possible I guess (as apps only react to users' actions and cannot act like cron jobs for example)?
As you see, I am pretty new to FB development and logic. Thanks so much for your expertise.
If you mainly target public pages then you should be ok.
You need to have a facebook app and then you can authenticate as the app from your program.
You will get an app token with which you should be able to use in order to crawl public pages data.
If you check the documentation for the Page object you'll see in the tables (fields and connections) that most of what's in the Permissions column is either "No access token or user access_token" or "any valid access_token or user access_token", if you have the app token you're good.
Also, and I think this is something you'll be interested in, the Page object has the "talking_about_count" field.
So, yes you can do it, at least most of it.
As for the TOS, since all of this is perfectly ok and straight from their official documentation, there's no problem.
I have recently been looking into adding Facebook Insights into one of our client's websites (www.mcvuk.com). I've created an app to associate with this and added the necessary Facebook meta tags to my site which reference the app id.
I was, until today, having issues adding the app domain information to https://developers.facebook.com/apps but have added this information in today.
My question is how long does it take before you will start to see results filter through for the site and is there any way of checking that everything has been set up correctly?
It might not be a matter of time, it might be a matter of how many 'likes' the app or page has. At least for pages, it tells you "Once 30 people like your Page, you'll get access to insights about your activity."
That's an interesting point.
It all depends on which metrics (results) you're after and how much traffic your app gets.
Additionally, you might want to look at facebook documentation for the metrics (results) you're looking for -- some of them are available monthly or weekly, others are a lifetime aggregate, and some are daily.
The easiest way to test would be to ask some of your friends to do whatever it is you want to test (comment on a post, link to a page, etc.).
I hope that answers some of your questions.
I am currently trying to get the posts for a specific user from Facebook's Graph API. I have done this numerous times before using a php script I have developed; but the problem this time seems to be on Facebook's end, not mine.
I am trying to get the posts from (replacing TOKEN with an access token):
https://graph.facebook.com/100001558773450/feed?access_token=TOKEN
The graph won't show any posts by the owner of that page but will show everyone else's posts, and as far as I can see the posts are marked as public, and there are no privacy settings set on the account that would stop it from adding the posts to the graph.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Nick
Check that you have requested the manage_pages permission to give you full access to the page (if you need access as the "page owner").
Using the access_token you've got, according to this documentation there are three different things that you can select feed, statuses and posts.
I'd give those three a go from https://graph.facebook.com and if what you get back is what you require.
https://graph.facebook.com/100001558773450/feed?access_token=...
https://graph.facebook.com/100001558773450/statuses?access_token=...
https://graph.facebook.com/100001558773450/posts?access_token=...
You need to check the "profile" privacy settings (what to share with apps). But most importantly, this is against Facebook ToS!
You can't use a user profile to represent your business, you need to use Facebook pages instead!
More can found here:
Why should I convert my profile (timeline) to a Page?
Since profiles
(timelines) are for meant individual people, they aren't suited to
meet your business needs. Pages offer more robust features for
organizations, businesses, brands, and public figures, which you can
learn more about here.
Further, maintaining a profile (timeline) for anything other than an
individual person is a violation of Facebook's Statement of Rights and
Responsibilities. If you don’t convert your profile (timeline) to a
Page, you risk permanently losing access to the profile (timeline) and
all of your content.