Using FQL to query insights and likes for Facebook Pages - facebook

We run some facebook pages for our clients and we'd like to run off some reports, like many people LIKED those pages yesterday, for example.
I can see that this can be done by FQL, but you need an access_token to run the queries using Facebook Graph API in (C#).
For these Facebook pages there isn't an app associated with them, so without app_id how can I get authenticated to be able to run those queries ?
Thanks

You could create an app that you then use to retrieve the stats.
If you then get an access token for a user that is an admin of the pages and request the read_insight extended permission you can get the insights data for each page, which will give you plenty of stats to report in a handy JSON format.
See here for more details on the insights in the graph API
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/insights/

Related

How to get my own Facebook user timeline using Graph API?

I would like to get all the posts and updates that are normally displayed in FB official application for MY account (this includes updates from my friends and liked pages).
I wasn't able to find any details how to get that, the only thing I've managed to get is my own posts.
Anyone got any experience with that using current Graph API verion (3.3)?
All the alternate FB clients (ex. Friendly) must be doing this somehow.
There is no way to get ANY data of users who did not authorized your App. Which means, there is no way to get posts of friends. You can only get your own friends, with the user_posts permission and the /me/posts endpoint. If some Apps access friend data without their authorization, they are most likely doing something that is not allowed.
Here is what I found in their API docs:
There are two scopes:
The user feed requires the user's permission
The public feed has fewer capabilities but doesn't require perms

How to get OTHER users' photos and albums with Facebook Graph API

Scenario: logged with my Facebook account and using a browser, I'm able to see some photos and albums of some users which aren't friends of mine (with a privacy setting of public or similar) and quite all their past profile photos.
For example the URL
https://www.facebook.com/<userid>/photos_all shows those photos.
I want to replicate behaviour with Graph API but GETting
https://graph.facebook.com/<userid>/photos?access_token=...
Gives me an empty data array.
Same scenario using tagged or albums instead of photos
I've tried to use site scraping but FB website uses AJAX to populate gridview of photos, so It's very difficult.
On Graph API Explorer I've requested and use an access token with all permissions and also a debug access token but I'm still unable to get other users' photos.
It's possibile to get photos of users which aren't in friend list with Facebook Graph API? Am I missing something?
For privacy reasons, it´s not possible to get the photos of OTHER users with the API. Even for the authorized user, you need the user_photos permission.
Scraping is not allowed btw: https://www.facebook.com/apps/site_scraping_tos_terms.php

How can I get the details of all fans of a Facebook page?

Suppose that I am the administrator of a Facebook page, I want to get all of the profile details of a the people who "liked" my page. Is this possible? How?
So far, I have only been able to get aggregated data through the Graph API. For example, "number of like in the past week".
There are posts that claim that I can do this with the FQL API, but the documentation for the FQL seems to have been hidden on FB developer site.
FQL reference is not "hidden", it's here: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql But there's no current official way to get the profile details of your Page's liker, because you'd need the permission to query the user data from the users.
There are some "hacks" as denoted at Facebook API: Get fans of / people who like a page for example, but it's strongly advised that you don't use these. Facebook forbids scraping for example, and once Facebook changes its website, those methods are likely to stop working.

How to get insights on a Facebook fan page without user login

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.

Facebook Graph Api json missing posts

I am developing an web app, which connect to facebook, to get posts, and other stuff liked by users. I have problem with getting all posts from user page using news feed(home connection of Grap API).
When getting access token in my app for user, I ask for read_stream, user_activities and offline access permissions. Then, when I use that token, to get json feed for
https://graph.facebook.com/me/home/?access_token=<retrived_access_token>
some posts(which are show on user page) are missing. I found that posts of my friends, which can be seen only by their friends, are not shown in that feed. The same issue is with posts of users which current I am subscribing.
I was searching on that for a while, and I found, that when I use link from http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/ to get my news feed, there are much more posts. It's seems to use a token generated for test console app for facebook api.
Then I tried to generate access token which would give me similar results using http://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer?method=GET. But even when I give to generated token all possible permissions I could not get it working good, there were still some missing posts.
I read answer in that post, Facebook graph API does not return all posts for user, which suggested, that this is because of permissions set by my people who publish posts, who don't want their data to be retrieved by an app. I run some quick test, and I found that changing that setting is working( when somebody change that setting her posts will disappear from both feeds - that using my app token for user, and that under link on api reference page), but it's not the case.
It seems that this token generated on api reference page have an special permission.
I really need to get as much posts from user page as possible. I know that I will not get those blocked by their author, but as many of my users subscribe other users I really need to get access to kind of posts shown on user page.
I also read Facebook graph API: feeds missing in json response but it was also not helpfull.
I will really appreciate any help.
It is impossible to get a full list of posts from the feed / home Graph API, but you can use FQL to query the stream table to get almost every post made by friends, here is a quick example of how you would do that with the javascript sdk:
var query = 'SELECT post_id FROM stream WHERE filter_key = "others"';
FB.api('fql', {'q': query}, function(posts) { console.log(posts.data); });
This will get you the post ids, which you can then use with graph api to fetch the rest of the post info. Or you can get the full list of fields here, you can't select * in FQL so you'll have to list each piece you want and then get comments and likes and names separately.
There is an assigned/medium bug on this at http://developers.facebook.com/bugs/228057243915183. You can bump up the priority by subscribing and indicating you can reproduce it.
Also see http://developers.facebook.com/bugs/231621496918030 where Facebook has said "the stream table and me/graph have limitations. See the documentation for more info. We're trying to make this more clear in the future." Personally I don't think there is really any more info in the documentation though.