I found a very similar question here: Actions do not appear on timeline, but the solutions offered there are not working for me.
I created a custom graph action and a custom graph object through my Facebook application, and the process of publishing seems to be working fine. When I post the data using the JavaScript SDK with my access token and the object ID, the Facebook API returns the ID of the action, which I can then access on the graph. This side of things is clearly working, since accessing the object via the graph with my app's access token returns all the information it is supposed to.
However, I see no record of this action on Facebook itself; not on my app's timeline, not on the aggregation I set up for this action. The solutions offered in the link above entail double-checking the validity of the meta tags, which I did using the debugger, and also ensuring that there are no URLs within the meta tags that are inaccessible, which is also not the case. Is there anything else that could prevent these actions from showing up on the timeline?
Thanks!
There can be some permission error for facebook (and thus global users) for some url. If you get the action response id, it has to be in your facebook timeline at least (not in others excluding the developers and testers of your app) and it really occurs almost real time.
PS: If you found a similar questions elsewhere, please try to go on with the discussion there instead of creating a duplicate question.
Related
I want to build a dashboard that returns more customized insights from the insights generated by app.
The app is a facebook connect website that users visit and view a list of products. They can post to facebook about that particular product by sharing a custom story that incorporates that product on their timeline.
When I go to the insights for my app, it does a great job of showing me all social impressions for all custom stories that were generated on my site.
I'd like to narrow that down even more for specific products.
My plan is to record the object ids that are generated by these actions and link them to a partucular product in my database.
I'd then like to create a new dashboard page that will allow me to login, request read_insights permission from me and then use that object_id:product mapping from my database to show how many social impressions where recorded for a given product's object_ids.
Is this possible? I've read alot about it but still haven't found the most elegant way to get a segmented report of social impressions per type of content that was posted.
Thanks for your time.
The implementation all depends on which platform you want your app to run on.
The first major component is you must have a Facebook developers account which is easy to signup for. Just go to developers.facebook.com and register. Takes like 2 mins. After that you will need to create your first app and add the correct domain name where your app will be hosted and what platform it will run on. (iOS, Android, Web, ect.) Once that is finished you can make your app public so you can use the Facebook API in your code.
For the app creation itself. The first thing you need to do is import the correct API for your platform. Which you can find a walk through at https://developers.facebook.com/docs/. Once the API is imported you must build a Facebook object which contains your app id and possibly app secret. If you're using JavaScript you don't want to use the app secret because it will be visible to the public.
Now that you have your Facebook object you must require the app users to log in and grant permission to your app. You can add extended permissions to your log in process by adding a scope value to the log in button generated by Facebook. Here is an example.
<fb:login-button id="loginBtn" max_rows="1" scope="basic_info,read_insights,manage_pages" size="medium" show_faces="false" auto_logout_link="true"></fb:login-button>
After the user is logged in you can now query information from the users account using Facebook Api calls to Social Graph. Facebook also provides a tool to help you figure out what information you can query. https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer
Everything else you want to do with the app can be done by Facebook API calls. You just need to insure you grant the user the correct permissions before making the API calls.
API calls are a little different depending on which language syntax you are using but they all follow the same data model and return some array of responses which can be parsed using JSON or the standard array format. The Graph Explorer tool listed above will show you the output for your queries so you can handle them accordingly.
I hope this helps gets you started.
EDITED
Here's the implementation in JavaScript
function getMetric(){
// make the API call
FB.api(
"/{app-id}/insights/application_opengraph_story_impressions",
function (response) {
if (response && !response.error) {
/* handle the result */
}
}
);
}
Here's the reference now that Facebook docs are back up https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/insights
application_opengraph_story_impressions will probably give you the total impression of all stories made by your app. I ran it against my Facebook app and it came back empty but I don't have any stories so it might work with your's. Also to note in the documentation there is an * by this metric and I could't find what that means.
I'm pretty sure that right now Facebook don't give developers ability to get insights about app custom stories.
Currently Facebook documentation has the following Graph APIs for Insights data:
/{page-id}/insights
/{app-id}/insights
/{domain-id}/insights
/{post-id}/insights (where this is a Page post)
So /{post-id}/insights won't work because custom story is actually user's post and others endpoints don't apply to your case.
As far as I know the only other option to access Insights is FQL. For that you'd use insights table in a manner similar to this:
SELECT ... FROM insights WHERE object_id = ... AND metric = ... AND end_time = ... AND period = ...
Now most likely this also won't work with your custom story posts (I don't have posts which I could try it on right now, so I can't tell) but at least it is not explicitly stated so in the documentation, so you should probably try it out.
UPDATE:
I wasn't able to get any insights data via FQL, although as far as I understand the following code should have gave me at least something (object id is for my page):
SELECT breakdown, end_time, event, metric, object_id, period, value FROM insights WHERE object_id = 224981264214413 and metric = 'page_fans' and period = period('lifetime') and end_time = 1395597892
But it results just in
{
"data": []
}
Facebook also has some pretty old bug report about similar topic: https://developers.facebook.com/x/bugs/508088155954330/ where they confirmed the issue, assigned it, and... did nothing to fix it for 6 months.
In case FQL doesn't work, my suggestion to you is - use your own analytics code to track the creation of custom stories and get the friend count of the users. It won't show you the real exposure of the posts but at least you will see some data on which types of custom stories where posted more often and what was the maximum potential friend count that could have seen them. By the way - to make charting easier, you could use Google Analytics events for that.
I am building a website that will require the user to provide permission for us to post a story back to the users wall when the user takes an action on my website. I would like the story to include a link back to my website so that friends can see the actions taken.
I am not sure of the correct permissions because I cannot get a link back to my website from the story post. I saw publish_stream, but that appears to be old now. Any pointers to FB policy and documentation would be appreciated. I
Instead of making stream posts, you should instead use Open Graph actions, which will give you a much better result and feel less 'spammy' to your users. I can't post code that will do this for you as it would need to fit into your existing setup, however it is a relatively simple process, which is well documented (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/actions/):
Auth users by prompting them to give publish_actions permission and any other permissions your app might need.
Store the users access token in your database (not necessary if you're using the client-side Javascript SDK, but you might want to do it anyway)
Setup your Open Graph Actions and Objects in the Developer Dashboard.
When a user performs a relevant action in your app, make a simple Graph API call to the following endpoint:
https://graph.facebook.com/me/YOUR_APP_NAMESPACE:YOUR_ACTION? YOUR_OBJECT_TYPE=YOUR_OBJECT_URL&access_token=YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN
Done.
You can add extra elements to the action, such as action links, however the basics are outlined above. Once you've performed those steps, the user will see something like this on their Timeline:
The part that says 'on NYCCookbook' is customisable and clicking on most parts of this story will bring Facebook users back to your site. There are many benefits you can get if you implement this all correctly.
I have tried posting to some different friends feeds. Sometimes the message does not show up on feed even if a get a "good" response back with a new graph api ID.
100002842168248_146917358746335 does not work for example
I don't get any errors or similar only a new ID for the post and when I try to access via graph api (developer console on FB) it return simply false?
https://graph.facebook.com/100002842168248_146917358746335
Using the same call but for another user is showing up on facebook feed without problems. Is there any more action I can take or should I simply take my "false" and give up.
It's probably a privacy/permission settings issue. If the user who's Wall you are posting too has it set so only Friends can view their Wall, you will not be able to view the post (via the Graph or otherwise) - even though your App made the post.
You can also get 'false' if, although the post is visible on Facebook.com with no problems, the user who posted it has opted out of Facebook Platform. This is a privacy setting which disables any apps from accessing any information about a user, their posts, etc.
Even if their posts are 'Public' on facebook.com, the API won't return anything about such users.
I'm developing an app which publishes actions to the timeline.
On the app settings, I've created the action "post" and use the built in object type "article".
Although my graph actions have not been approved by facebook, that should not be a problem, because I am logged in as the developer of the app.
My article URLs pass facebook's linter with warnings, but no errors.
When my app notifies facebook of the the post action, it appears to succeed. Facebook returns an ID representing the action.
When I use facebook's graph explorer to view that ID, the data appears to be correct, showing the correct action type and object data. (If there's a URL to browse the action on facebook, instead of the graph explorer, I do not know what it is).
Still, with all the above apparently working without errors, I never see the action on my timeline. Whether I browse my own timeline, or when logged in as a friend and another developer of the app, I never see any indication on facebook.com that the action was performed.
What am I missing to make my custom action appear on my timeline page?
I had a similar problem. I was using OG and I could post everything successfully, but the posts didn't appear in timeline, but only in the activity log in Facebook.
I just went to the settings of the action and set "Explicitly Shared: This action can specify the user explicitly shared an action." to ON.
Then in my piece of code I put "true" to the key "fb:explicitly_shared" while creating the OG object.
If no error is being returned it sounds as if there is an issue in your public page that is preventing Facebook from knowing what to post.
Have you double checked your OG: meta tags through Facebook's validation tool [ https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug ]. While you need all of the values to be filled in, the type bit is the most overlooked and must be setup properly to link to your particular application and corresponding action.
If your OG: data is correct and validating you should also check the detail settings for your action and aggregations. If the phrase / tense bits are not filled in Facebook may be uncertain how to make your post appear back to on the timeline.
Discoverd the problem....
My article page include an article:author tag. The URL in that tag was not visible to anonymous users. So, I'm guessing, facebook visited that author URL and received a HTTP 403.
When I removed the article:author tag, the items started appearing on my timeline.
So be careful with all tags and put all urls through facebook's debug tool.
Hmmm Interesting
Was having the same issue...
Using the XFBML, fb:like with all required og meta tags validating on the linter.
Last month when I liked a 'product' on my website, the post was published on my fb timeline wall no worries. Nice, perfect!
Today after clicking Like, I noticed it wasn't publishing to my timeline wall at all... but was logged in the Activity Feed.
It did however post to my wall if I commented on the Like Button flyout comment section.
Then I found this
"Pages of type article do not have publishing rights, and will not show up on user's profiles because they are not real world objects."
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraphprotocol/#types
I've been getting the same issue with a feed dialog post. The posts can be navigated to directly, but doesn't show on timeline. More details here:
Actions not appearing on timeline
I had a similar problem, but everything was actually working correctly. If you get a returned ID and your article appears in your RECENT ACTIVITY, then all should be good.
The perceived issue, your post not appearing in your timeline, is actually the correct behavior. Your post doesn't appear in your timeline because it should appear in your friends' timeline as an activity that you completed. Once they comment or like it, then it should reappear on your timeline.
For me the issue was the posts doesn't show on timeline for all users except me also it was public !, i fixed it by make turn on application as online to be available to all users
I've been pouring over Facebook's Graph API but I can't seem to find any documentation with regards to retrieve comments users leave as they Like an Open Graph object (in my case, a web page with a Like button).
At a minimum, I would assume that there would be some way to retrieve comments from users whose privacy settings allow anybody to see their updates (I guess this might require me to know the UID of everybody who Likes my web page). Alternatively, there might be some method where user comments may be associated with the Open Graph object's stream instead.
Anybody?
To see a user's wall feed via the API (even public ones) you will to have them authenticate your app. Yeah, pretty crappy not to be able to query their public messages, but it is a current limitation of Facebook's API.