How to migrate an Open Graph Page to a Business Page? - facebook

I have implemented the like button on a website. People have liked the website, and I have the option to administer that open graph object. However, on the administration page I see the following notice:
Administer Your Page
This is the administration interface for your
webpage at [...]. You can see Insights and
publish to the users that have liked your webpage. Only the
administrators of the webpage can view this interface, other users are
sent to the webpage.
This is a ghost page, because, as the notice says, only the administrator(s) can see it. I don't want the behavior of users being sent to my website. I want them to be able to stay on Facebook and see this page, just like they would see and interact with another business page.
Is there a tool or a request form to do this kind of migration (i.e. from an open graph page to a normal business page)?
I have researched for about two days for this issue, but I have not found any leads.

According to this help article, you can merge two facebook pages into one. But the constraint is that you can merge to a page with higher likes only, and the page with fewer likes will be removed. I am not sure if it works for ghost pages or not.

Shef, let me try to answer:
if you have an app myapp, that is canvas url https://apps.facebook.com/myapp
then you will have an application profile page: http://www.facebook.com/myapp [*]
So if a search your app from google or facebook, then they come to first this page,
and if they click go to app, they reach to your app.
However if you have just implemented like url: myapp.com/myitem=1
then you will have this "ghost" page. You need this ghost page, because you need somewhere
to administrate your likes
So you are asking a real page instead ghost, well this is hard to implement this request by facebook guys. Because there is like link to refer some url. So there must be some pop up asking user: 'Do you want to follow link or go to business page instead'
[*] username is not available anymore for facebook apps. see How to get name of facebook application page?

You can use the ref parameter while specifying your like button. This ref parameter will be set by Facebook, for all url's/links that appear on Facebook, i.e wherever this like action is displayed with the link to the url liked by the user. So you know when a user visits your page through Facebook. Check the following from this link:
ref - a label for tracking referrals; must be less than 50 characters and can contain alphanumeric characters and some punctuation (currently +/=-.:_). The ref attribute causes two parameters to be added to the referrer URL when a user clicks a link from a stream story about a Like action:
fb_ref - the ref parameter
fb_source - the stream type ('home', 'profile', 'search', 'other') in which the click occurred and the story type ('oneline' or 'multiline'), concatenated with an underscore.
Upon calling your url you can redirect the user to the page on Facebook that you want. Business pages on Facebook have a particular url, of course, and you can easily do the redirect.
I don't think that you have an option to migrate an open graph page to a normal business page. You can however create your page, and give it the same name as your website. The draw back here would be when users like your page on Facebook, you won't be able to accumulate the likes already garnered by your website.
EDIT
Take a look at the like box plugin (Facebook doc here ). It can be used to like pages that are on Facebook itself, from external websites. This way you will be able to accumulate your likes. You can also modify the plugin to look like a like button, not fully but almost. But you still end up creating a new page. And the old likes will not be available.

Related

Facebook tab iframe sharing

i have a tab in a page, with an iframe to a site built up to be like a simple facebook app, where users can create simple profile pages with an image and some text.
Now, once the profile is created (which is a simple html page with its own URL), i need to be able to share it, using some sharing services (like addthis) or even the standard send button. The problem is that the original site has to be always hidden (users have to not be able to see the URL of the "site"), but the sharing system need an absolute URL to know... what to actually share.
Obiouvsly, working in an iframe, the url is always that of the facebook page (it doesn't change navigating the site's pages), so how can I do this?
Thanks.
The problem is that the original site has to be always hidden (users have to not be able to see the URL of the "site")
Why not?
Please don’t say “security concerns” right now, because you should know there is no such thing as “security by obscurity” …
If you just want to have Open Graph URLs, that can be liked and shared, but want the user clicking on one of those URLs end up being in your iframe tab on Facebook again – then do a redirect to your page tab for actual users.
Either do it via JavaScript (which the Facebook scraper does not care about); or with a server-side redirect for any client that is not the Facebook scraper (it’s identifiable by it’s user agent or originating IP address of the request).

Like button for Facebook page shows generic Facebook description in News Feed

I want a Like button on my web site that Likes my Facebook profile (rather than my web page), so that when a user clicks it they subscribe to my Facebook posts.
I've created the Like button using the tool at https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/
Further down that page there is an FAQ entry:
Can I link the Like button to my Facebook page?
Yes. Simply specify the URL of your Facebook page in the href
parameter of the button.
So, I've edited the href parameter to point to my Facebook page. eg:
https://www.facebook.com/myfacebookid
When a user clicks the Like button it has the desired effect. The user ends up having Liked my Facebook page. This is easily verified by the user going to my Facebook profile and checking that the Like button has changed to Liked.
But. When the user clicks the Like button, and entry appears in their News Feed with a generic Facebook description. ie:
Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and
others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to
keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, post links
and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.
I don't want a generic post about Facebook to appear. I want the description to relate to my Facebook account and/or web site.
Normally, I could modify this behavior with the Opengraph og: description tag, but as the page in the href is a Facebook page and not my own, I can't control the Opengraph tags.
I'm pretty sure that this was working okay before I enabled timeline for my account, so maybe this is a timeline bug?
So, how do I add a Like button which a) Likes my Facebook profile rather than one of my own web pages, and b) Posts a description of my Facebook profile rather than give a generic Facbook description?
Are all your fields in the info part of your page filled in, and/or completed? I just tested your theory and it seemed to work as expected, only thing is I know all fields in "info" are filled it. Give that a try.
This may happen if you have filled invalid/incomplete/wrong og tags in past and later changed them. Facebook's cache creates problem sometime.
Try putting all the entries (i.e. all og tags) and then debug them here http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug. This debugger gives a detailed info about the url with og tags and also clears the cache for you.
This should solve the problem.
You have 3 important fields that used on page opengraph: Name,Description,Profile Image.
They are used when some one post your link on Facebook, or Google or some else web service that handle opengraph.
Actually, the suggested answers currently do not work and there is an open bug / ticket on Facebook for it. Up to now, there's no fix.
The problem is that you can not use simply https://www.facebook.com/myfacebookid. You should copy and paste the exact page URL. If you have a low number of likes it would look something like https://www.facebook.com/pages/[YourPageName]/[Your page Id]/, and this is the URL that you should use at this point.
If it does not work, try also https://www.facebook.com/[YourPageName]/[Your page Id]/.
In short, copy-paste the URL, do not type it manually.

Facebook creates a Business Page for each page on my site

I'm experiencing some issues with my website, regarding to Facebook page's behaviour. I added the opengraphs tags (including an "fb:admins" with my own ID) and now, everytime I click on a Like button on my domain, a new Page is created inside Facebook (i.e. on the http://facebook.com/pages/manage).
Why is this happening? And even more important: how can I make it stop?! I manually created the Page on Facebook for my business, and I don't want any other Page on FB to be created!
Thanks in advance!
That's how the Like button works ; it creates a virtual 'admin' page for each liked URL which is of the appropriate type which allows you to post updates into the news feed of the users who have liked that URL - it also enables access to the insights for the Like button
If you don't want them appearing in the list of adminned pages on your account for some reason, the easiest thing to do is to create an App, and use the App ID as the admin of the pages instead of using your user ID.

How does the fb_ref parameter on a Like button actually work?

Trying to track sources of Likes to a Facebook Page. Docs from Facebook say:
ref - a label for tracking referrals; must be less than 50 characters and can contain
alphanumeric characters and some punctuation (currently +/=-.:_). The ref attribute causes
two parameters to be added to the referrer URL when a user clicks a link from a stream story
about a Like action:
fb_ref - the ref parameter
fb_source - the stream type ('home', 'profile', 'search', 'other') in which the click
occurred and the story type ('oneline' or 'multiline'), concatenated with an underscore.
But if you are sending Likes to a Facebook Page - NOT an external website - where can you get this fb_ref data? Appears that it's not available in Insights, and you can't put Google Analytics on a Wall, obviously.
Any insights here?
My understanding is that you would use it as follows:
Jim is logged into your site.
Put a FB like button on a page on your web site. You're generating the page dynamically so you can generate the FB like button dynamically too. Since "Jim" is logged in, you can include "Jim" as the ref in the FB Like button.
Jim, an FB user, LIKES the page, and presses the Like button (that includes the Jim ref).
A link to your web page appears on Jim's FB page and all of his friends see it.
Susan, a FB friend of Jim, sees the "Like" about your website on Jim's wall (it appears in her newsfeed.) Excited about the link, she presses it.
Your website receives an incoming GET request from Susan's browser. It includes the ref=Jim. It also includes the fb_source="profile" This tells your page about the requestor.
Your website now displays the page to Susan. The page (dynamically) includes the greeting "Thanks for being a friend of Jim!" etc. Note, you don't know the requestor is Susan, you only know that the requestor found out about the page via Jim's Like of the page. In order to find out that the person is Susan, you need to get her to signin/signup for your website.
Docs for the extra Get params: see the description of the ref param here
Added
Re: But if you are sending Likes to a Facebook Page - NOT an external website - where can you get this fb_ref data? Appears that it's not available in Insights, and you can't put Google Analytics on a Wall, obviously.
Do you mean that you're creating a Like button for a page on Facebook that is not a FB app? AFAIK you're right, you can't see the ref data. The ref data is made available to the target of the Like.
You could create a simple website page that re-directs to the FB page. You'd then collect ref info before re-directing to the FB page. Your simple re-direct page would be the target of the Like. But you'd have to fake out FB's graph tags--they'd know that the canonical url for the page was fb.com/xyz. May not be possible to direct to your_site.com/fb/xyz.

Is it possible to combine a facebook page and a website in the social graph?

Facebook has "pages" for many things, like people, companies, etc. But it also has this open graph protocol. My company already has a web site, and we also have a facebook page (i.e. http://www.facebook.com/company)
People can "like" either one. We use a like iframe on the company website that refers to the website URL. I'd like to know if they can be connected such that when someone likes our facebook page, they really like our company's web site.
Or are these always going to be considered two different things?
To elaborate on puffpio's answer, you can have a like button for your existing page on you website by using the existing page's facebook url as the href parameter.
It is essential that you do not put a like button to your url if you do not want your likes split between the two. In this scenario there is no reason to have an open graph object for your page other than to provide correct data when a user shares your url in their feed. It's important to note that these shares also count towards the counter on the like button and as far as I know there is no way to recover them.
You can also use this url as your og:url tag however this will cause the linter to throw errors since the domains do not match.
No. Page and website is something different and you can't force user to like both
They are different things, but a workaround is that the like button on the company's website can be a like button for their page on Facebook with a caveat like 'Like us on Facebook' or something