links pre-filled messages on social sites - facebook

I've written a simple tool that lets users keep track of some stuff (to make it simple, lets say they're entering their weight every day). Throughout the site, I want to add links to social sites, where user could share that info. Example: after user successfully adds a new record, I'd like to show him links that when clicked would redirect him to twitter, facebook and similar sites with a pre-filled message: "my weight today is XX kg". On the graph page, I'd show links that would contain a different string ("see my daily weight graph").
I tried at http://www.addthis.com, but it only offers pre-filled messages for twitter.
I don't really want to spend X days reading APIs for every major social website out there... can you guys suggest a solution? Either a resource with specs of links, some 3-rd party app (I'd look at the code), or some web service like addthis.com...

For Twitter:
http://twitter.com/home?status=My+weight+today+is+XX+kg
Also have a look at http://tweetmeme.com/
For Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/connect/prompt_feed.php?&message=My+weight+today+is+XX+kg

Related

Pinterest invite Facebook friends functionality is impossible?

If you connect to Pinterest with Facebook, it has multiple dialogs that show your complete list of friends (including those not using Pinterest) asking you to invite them. One is on the front page, and there is another at http://www.pinterest.com/find_friends/
This type of menu is only supposed to be possible for games that use Canvas by using the taggable_friends API, not for a website.
I see multiple questions here asking about how to do exactly what Pinterest is doing, but the response always seems to be it is impossible, the only supported way is to use the Send dialog (for a website not an app/game anyway).
It seems like they got some special permissions before from this thread: https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/146850488822600
Is their current build just another special permissions thing? I haven't been able to find anything stating that they have special permission, and it would be nice to confirm that considering it's not very convincing to say it's impossible when there's a high profile example of it.
I don't want the list to spam their friends, I still want to go through the Send dialog but it would nice to show a list of people that they can invite in a format that is shared with other social sites we have integration with.

Dynamically linking to a Facebook Company Page

Our database has an entry for our companies' Facebook and Twitter pages. With Twitter, it's possible to create dynamic links based solely on the company's Twitter handler. For instance, if the company provides us with the Twitter handle acme, we can dynamically create a link to their Twitter page with <a href='http://www.twitter.com/#{company.twitter_name}'></a>.
In some instances, the same is true of Facebook. Coca Cola for instance has http://www.facebook.com/cocacola. Many other companies have a url that looks more like http://www.facebook.com/pages/acme/123456789. In the latter case, the numerical id at the end is necessary to reach the page. The URL http://www.facebook.com/pages/acme would not work.
My question is, is there a way to dynamically link to a Facebook company page with just their handle? Or do you always need to provide a full URL? I'm hoping Facebook has some magic back door for developers that I simply haven't happened upon yet. Thanks for your feedback, one way or the other!
A link in the form http(s)://facebook.com/profile.php?id={nummeric_id_here} always works, for pages as well as for user profiles.
It automatically redirects to the “real” address – to the username that the user or page might have set, or to an address in the form you mentioned (for pages that do not have enough likes yet to set their own user name).

Get Facebook referral URL in Google Analytics

In my Google Analytics reports I get "facebook.com / referral" as the source. Is it possible to get the exact URL?
I don't think it's possible. as #yahelc pointed on a previous comment most traffic from facebook goes through a facebook controlled redirect on page facebook.com/l.php .So if you want to have campaigns on facebook you can use urls with campaign query parameters to keep track of it.
eg: link to
http://www.example.com/?utm_campaign=Facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com
Now they will show up in GA as a separate campaign and you can tell how many visitors come from that specific link. You probably want to minify that link using bit.ly or goo.gl.
Create multiple campaigns on facebook and change the utm_campaign parameter as much as you want. You can also create different utm_content parameter to separate your marketing efforts on facebook. Keep the utm_medium and utm_source as static as on the example above.
This is how social marketing analytics measures marketing efforts on social networks. Anything that comes from facebook is not tagged you know comes from people posting links to your site other than you.
At the same time it really makes no sense to have the referral url at all. If you think about it most of the times it will be from private posts that you don't even have access to see, even if you had a url for it. That's just not the way facebook works. It doesn't have pages, it has streams and posts.
More about url tagging:
http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1033863
The answer is yes and no. You can drill down to referral path for facebook source in the report Traffic Sources -> Sources -> Refferals by simply pressing facebook.com at the Source coloumn, just like for all other visits from the referring site.
But that would be not much of a use, because for facebook you'll always see /l.php. And that's how facebook works, it doesn't allow visitors to visit the link immedeately, instead it redirects user to the page with url facebook.com/l.php?u=<link-to-your-site.com> with a redirect or maybe with some text like "if you're sure you want to leave", so technically, the referring page would be this /l.php that GA shows.
So if you need to track the efficency of your Facebook activities - use utm tags, like #Eduardo Cereto mentioned. Here's a very nice video tutorial on link tagging for GA: http://services.google.com/analytics/breeze/en/v5/campaigntracking_adwordsintegration-v23_ia5/ (starts from p. 17, you can skip all that goes before).
Hope it helps!
i just know this settings here:
http://www.sebastienpage.com/2009/05/06/google-analytics-trick-see-the-full-referring-url/

How can I like a post/comment in facebook fan page from my custom website

I am importing the posts and comments in my FB fan page to my custom website. I am importing using graph api. In the response array I am getting two types of action URL for "comments" and "likes".
See below :
http://www.facebook.com/149263441795729/posts/240758399312899
Using this link in following code
<fb:like href="http://www.facebook.com/149263441795729/posts/240758399312899" width="450" height="80"/>
I get the following error
The page at http://www.facebook.com/149263441795729/posts/240758399312899 could not be reached.
How can I like these posts or comments from my website? Is there any solution for that?
I think--I'm no expert here--that redirects such as this are controlled by Facebook, with a cross-site scripting policy file on their servers that say whether or not they will allow redirects and to who. On my website for example I allow anybody to cross link, since I'm just a little guy, but I bet Facebook only allows it with preferred partners like various corporations, see the story below. That would be my best guess.
Paul
http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2011/09/15/facebook-may-be-adding-cross-linking-to-foursquare-yelp-gowalla-and-more-on-pages/
Facebook may be adding cross-linking to Foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla and more on Pages
Facebook appears to have added cross-linking between Pages and other location-based sites like Foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla and SCVNGR to its Pages, reports Scribbal. Tech evangelist Robert Scoble posted a notice on his Google+ profile earlier today that indicated a new partnership between Foursquare and Facebook as the Page for a place was shown to direct viewers to the comparable location on Foursquare.
The links appear off to the left underneath the ‘Like’ count and checkin count on a location’s page. The only question that remains is whether the users are activating these connections themselves or if it is something that is done automatically. This could be Facebook’s plan to integrate itself with other location sites now that it has distributed the Facebook Places features throughout its framework.
Facebook has been on a tear lately, adding the Subscribe button and smart Friends list features just this week, as well as Facebook integration into the new Skype for Mac. It is clearly making an effort to maintain its lead over Google+ as the preeminent social network and it doesn’t want lack of features to be a reason for anyone to quit it.
We have reached out to Facebook about this new feature and will update this post when we hear back.

How to merge comment stream on Facebook events and my own website

I have a website that allows people to post events and it automatically posts their events to facebook if they so choose. I also integrated facebook comments on the event pages on my website.
Is it possible to merge the comments that people leave on my website's event pages with the comments that people leave on the facebook event page that was automatically made for them? I can't seem to find any documentation on this.
Edit: Just to clarify: The comments on my website are done via the facebook-comments API, they are not a module of my application.
Adding a separate answer, as after clarification it's significantly different.
If you want to basically have the wall of your event show up on your website, you can use the Event API to pull in wallposts and display them. To be able to post to that wall, you would have to do some custom coding to authenticate the user with publish_stream permission and then have a form on your site that would post to the event's wall, as noted in the post section of the above link.
Someone may have done this already and put code out there, but I doubt there is an easier way to get your ideal situation up and running. This use case isn't as automagic as the comments box, unfortunately.
If you're just looking to spread your events socially, however, the comments box will post to the commenters' walls with a link to your event page, which can then in turn point them to the Faecbook event. You might be able to use the Facebook event's URL as the URL for your comment box on the website, so it would just post a link directly to the Facebook event, but I'm not sure on that one.
I looked at this in my app, and we ended up deciding to just maintain separate streams. This is because it's only a one-way integration - you can get comments from Facebook via the Graph API and format them on your own website, in-line with your website comments, but there's no way to push comments from your website up to Facebook.
You could, if you wanted, just use the Facebook comment form for all comments - this has been done by big sites such as TechCrunch, and is effective, but it requires users to have a Facebook, AOL, Yahoo, or Hotmail account. Whether you want to do that or not depends on your preferences and userbase.
there a tool that combines comments form different pages or different sources
Check https://feedgun.com which works on pulling comments from different sources like YouTube videos, existing wordpress sites, facebook comments plugins and even DIsqus account and combine them all together and publish them on any of your webpages, and it all works automatically once you set them where to pull and where to publish.