Sites like appdata dot com, provide detailed stats on usage of thousands of facebook applications. How do they collect such data?
From what I understand, FB provides app developers with stats for their apps (same with fan page admins). But how do I get these data programatically, is there any API for these?
Facebook does provide all of this through the graph api, which is at graph.facebook.com. To get all the extended data, you will need an access token.
Details, at least for applications (an can probably be expanded to pages, since the graph api works for all "objects" on FB) is found at http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api#analytics
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In the past, I think a Facebook Page access token could be generated manually, and then used with the graph API to query posts, comments, likes, shares, etc. Now it seems you cannot query anything without developing an app that I login to and then in turn the app generates the access token. Is that true? For example, this question from 2015 claims no access token is needed for public data, but when I try their example it returns "An access token is required to request this resource."
I'm the admin of my page that ran a basic contest (giveaway). I'd like to use the graph API to fetch the names of people that liked, shared, or commented on a post. Then I want to cross reference it with those that like the page. Do I have to register and develop an app for this? Does my page have an access token available without going through the app registration and review process?
Can I access a Facebook Page with the Graph API without creating an app?
No, that is not possible. You always have to use an App for any API Access.
Then I want to cross reference it with those that like the page.
That is not possible either, not even with an App. I assume you want to make sure that participants like your Page - which is not allowed. People cannot be "incentivized" to like your Page.
Platform Policy: https://developers.facebook.com/policy/
Explanation about the specific rule against requiring people to like your Page: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/examples-platform-policy-4.5
Is it possible to programmatically analyze facebook trade groups? If yes, could you point me to a tutorial?
Edit: OK, seems like it's illegal per Facebook Terms of Service. I guess this makes the question irrelevant: https://www.facebook.com/apps/site_scraping_tos_terms.php
As Wizkid mentioned, facebook does not provide an api for fetching other people's facebook page content.
You can access plenty of information about your own Facebook Page using the Graph API, but not pages you dont have permissions on.
Programmatically accessing the page content of pages outside the graph api violates the facebook TOS, which will result in banning.
I want to add the 'Log in with Facebook' option to my website, however I'm unsure how to integrate the information gained when someone logs into my website with Facebook with my current Google Analytics.
Is it possible to link up a visit in Google Analytics with a user who has logged into the site with Facebook to enable me to see things like age, gender etc?
Any help you can give me on this would be much appreciated.
Thanks,
Ben
you may have to do this via a redirection or possibly a frame.
Google Analytics does nolt track individual users, it provides anonymized data. So at the top level, no you cannot do this. However, there are a few more things avaiable to you. One: Facebook provides facebook insights, their own tracking suite, that will give you demographic information on the users of a facebook app or fan page. You site will effectively become a facebook app when you use their user authenication, so you will be able to get insights tracking on you site. At the present moment, facebook insights and google analyitcs do not itegrate or share data. Facebook insight also provides anonymized data, so you will not be able to identify an individual through the tracking.
The final option is, now that you are tracking users through login, you can implement your own tracking info on your site to see what individual users are doing, and attempt to track their preferences.
Its also entirely legal (in the United States at least) to buy access to marketing data and use use your registered user name pool to get additional information.
If you wanted, you could set up a "funnel" in Google.
When a user logs in through Facebook, you could send them to a specific page and then track their progress from there...
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55515
So using this you could get the percentage of users who log in through Facebook... etc.
But to collect information other than that, you would have to get the correct permissions documented here eg. user_birthday (to get the user's Birthday) and query the Graph API from there, thus implementing your own tracking of users.
You can query the Graph API using the various SDKs that Facebook provide explained here.
First of all you should check out this Google document. It explains, how you set a custom unique user id via google analytics.
Further you've to send an event to google analytics (e.g. 'fb_login') via the callback function of your facebook login function.
I have looked on 100 forums looking for a simple answer for how to stream every post on a Facebook page's wall (not using the like box for just the pages posts, but everyone's posts). I am the admin of the page and I am already using the like box for my posts so I understand that, however the developer pages of Facebook are too confusing for such a simple task. I will be inserting the stream into an HTML page which will be hosted on www.1and1.com so it can handle most, if not all code.
I know it is a lot to ask but is there evem someplace online that will offer plain step-by-step instructions for my specific needs?
If the social plugins they make available aren't sufficient, you could just pull in the feed with the Facebook graph api using the javascript sdk (easiest) or there is probably an SDK for whatever programming language you know. For example, you can see a list of posts on the coca cola page using the Facebook graph explorer:
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer/?method=GET&path=cocacola%2Ffeed
The /page/feed method needs an access token, but you can use the graph explorer to get an offline_access token that you can use to pull the data in. This may eliminate javascript sdk usage though unless you want to first prompt users to authenticate your application. But otherwise you would just parse the json feed that is returned in the url indicated in the graph explorer (and add your access_token to the end of the url).
Here is a good PHP tutorial on how to display a groups feed on a web page. It would be just as easy to display the posts from a page (since you are the admin)
Just replace the group ID with the page ID. Here is a link to the feed for the Facebook Platform feed graph api results. More info on FB Pages here.
I'm trying to get a user to 'Like' a page via the SDK. User is signed in and I get a valid access tokken form the cookie. My APP has asked for permissions read_stream and publish_stream. I can successfully do things like post to their wall, etc. But when my APP tries to 'Like' a page, I get the error back:
OAuthException: (#3) Application does not have the capability to make this API call.
Am I missing some other permission, or is there a setting I have to turn on in my APP? I'm at a loss here.
You can't like a Page on behalf of a user (Bugzilla discussion). You can, however, like posts, comments, and photos on behalf of a user.
Edit 7/9/2012
Since bugzilla no long exists, the bug linked above is inaccessible. Google doesn't have a cached version of the page, so I ran another search. The best thing I could come up with was this Google Code Discussion regarding the ActionScript API.
Facebook makes brief mention of Publishing likes via the Graph API in the documentation, but doesn't say one way or another whether you can like a Page on behalf of a user - just "Objects" which (probably arguably) are not "objects" in Facebook-lingo.
My thought is, the API to like page is available, but is only offered to white listed applications (such as, the Facebook iOS and Android applications) written by "special" publishers. There's obvious reasons why Facebook wouldn't want/allow developers to create like connections on the graph. It would be taken advantage of by spammers and other nefarious developers and would deteriorate the meaning of what a "like" represents for a page on Facebook.
My guess is, you'd have to make a pretty strong case to Facebook about why you need/want access to the Page's Like connection (for publishing) before they'd even consider giving you access. I'd also guess that they'd want to verify that you're doing only user initiated like creations (in such a way that the iOS application would handle it) so as to protect the reptutation/meaning of a "like" action.
Actually this is NOT true, but you have to do a complicated Javascript / UIWebView process in order to display a Facebook 'page' of JUST the like button on your view, and this like button you can configure in the JavaScript / Objective-C (using string replacement) to be any Facebook page url you like.
Facebook's platform policies don't allow for a web-based like button aside from using the officially supported options
Those options doesn't require using OAuth or the Open Graph api. However, facebook just added support for mobile apps to send like actions through opengraph.
I'm not sure if they intend to allow sites to customize their like buttons or just apps...
Liking works for me with the iOS SDK using the graph api:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/actions/builtin/likes/