I'm trying to develop an analytics application for Facebook and I would like to count for example the number of comments a user has submitted to any kind of objects (posts, links, photos, etc...)
From browsing though the Facebook API I've noticed that the comments table is not indexed on the from user id field which means that we cannot query, for the comments starting from a user object (one has to first use a post or other object to get the comments).
I'm wondering if I could get a notification through the Real-time updates API when a user posts a comment. Also what exactly are the fields one could get notifications about through the real-time API (namely all the fields
The fields that you can get from Real Times updates API are descripted in official docs[1]
[1] http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/realtime/
Related
I am trying to construct a Top 5 of engaged users and users that liked something on my Facebook page(a non-profit)(for instance posts, links or images). It has to be an aggregated total of engagement and likes for all items on the page per user.
Can anybody provide with some clues as to which Facebook API calls I could use for this. At this moment I am only capable of determining which users liked the page, or a particular post.
If the question is too general or anything else, I'll gladly modify it. I would have liked to attach image for clarification, but is not a possibility for me yet due to reputation score.
The only way to do this is to get all likes/comments/whatever from every single post with the API, store the numbers in your database and compare User IDs. You would have to keep it up to date too, so you would need to refresh your database entries from time to time.
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've set up a Realtime Subscription for object user and fields feed and I am receiving realtime posts from Facebook.
I'm not interested in getting an update about every little thing that happens on every user's feed though. Is there a way to subscribe to just a single post?
My app is making a post to several user's feeds and then I would simply like my app to monitor anytime that specific post is liked or commented on.
Is it possible to subscribe to a certain post?
In current implementation of Realtime Updates seems like it is impossible, because you can not subscribe to specific object. Furthermore updates information that you receive doesn't contain any identifying information like post ID.
related to Open Graph api for feed returning inconsistent results
When I publish a post on a page's feed using my App, facebook returns some id in the form of <page_id>_<post_id>, but when the same App receives a Real time Update from the same page—say a like or a comment—the parent_id field of the like or comment contains only the <post_id> part!
Is this a bug or what?
Here is the response from facebook engineers -
This is by design. For a realtime update generated by a comment, the parent_id will just show and not include the page_id.
For specific examples, please refer to our documentation (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/page/#realtime) and look under the sub-sections "Feed Example."
I want to be able to count the total number of likes for a post or photo no matter how many times the post has been shared and reshared.
I want to know how popular a post is across the whole Facebook Universe.
Is this even possible?
This is not fully possible, for these reasons:
Facebook does not indicate via the API whether a post is a re-share
of another post (there is no "via" property on Post objects, in
other words). Nor is there a property that indicates where or how
many times a particular post has been re-shared.
Many posts on Facebook use privacy settings set by the user creating the post, and
this applies to re-shared stories as well. Your app has access to
whatever its users give it permission to read, but that does not
grant it access to the feeds of all users on Facebook.
At most, you could theoretically do this (although I am not sure if there are other limitations in place to prevent this):
Search all PUBLIC posts on Facebook, for text that matches the text in the post you want to track. (see the documentation under "Searching" here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/). Aggregate the Likes for all of these posts. Just understand that this is only the subset of posts that your app is capable of viewing.