In this post I am going to explain, in high level details, how you can develop your own Face­book inte­gra­tion.  You will want to read the post on what the face­book inte­gra­tion pro­vides, before you read this post so you under­stand what the goal of this inte­gra­tion is. This post is intended for developers.

First, you need to get in the mind­set of think­ing of one fan page at a time.  If you want to expand to mul­ti­ple pages then just loop over the logic.  Also, the process will run sev­eral times a day.  Ide­ally once every hour and send data each time it runs.

Resources

Client Library: http://​wiki​.devel​op​ers​.face​book​.com/​i​n​d​e​x​.​p​h​p​/​C​a​t​e​g​o​r​y​:​C​l​i​e​n​t​_​L​i​b​r​a​r​ies

FQL Wiki: http://​wiki​.devel​op​ers​.face​book​.com/​i​n​d​e​x​.​p​h​p​/​FQL

Part 1: Fans

To get the fan count you will want to use Facebook’s FQL. You will want to run a query like this: “SELECT fan_count FROM page where page_id=$pageId”

Once you have the fan count you will want to save it to a file ( or DB ) and upload it ONCE a day into an numeric event with the Omni­ture XML Data Inser­tion API.

To get the fan changes you will look at the saved fan count from the last time the process was run and com­pare it to the cur­rent exe­cu­tion of the process.  Then you will upload the dif­fer­ence to give you the num­ber of new fans since the last exe­cu­tion.  Once you have the fan changes you will send them into a numeric event.

Part 2: Posts, Com­ments, Likes

This is where things get tricky.  You can’t pull the num­ber or com­ments or likes from the API, because the Face­book table that holds the data stores it based on the post_id.  But we are lucky enough to have a created_date for the post_id.

From that you will use a query sim­i­lar to this:

“SELECT post_id,updated_time,created_time,comments.count,likes.count ’ .

‘FROM stream WHERE source_id = ‘.$pageId.

’ AND created_time >= ‘.$created_time_start.

’ AND created_time <= ‘.$created_time_end.’ limit 50″}’;

You will notice in the above query that it is lim­it­ing based on the cre­ated time start and cre­ated time end.  Basi­cally, we can’t look at all posts through­out his­tory so we need to have a limit.  After a lot of test­ing we found that look­ing back 7 days was fairly safe.  Yes, we will lose some likes and com­ments but those are far out on the long tale.

The results from the query will be based on the post_id and that is how you want to store it.   You will look at the data from the last time the process was run iter­at­ing through each post over the past 7 days and com­par­ing the num­ber of com­ments and likes.  Again, you will find the dif­fer­ence between the com­ments and likes (same way as you did with the fans) then upload the dif­fer­ence into incre­menter events.  Finally, the posts are a lit­tle sim­pler in that you look at the last saved data and if the post_id does not exist, then that means it is a new post so you incre­ment the post counter and upload into another numeric event.

I know this is high level but the logic is fairly com­plex so you will need to work out a lot of the details even if I try to cover every detail I can think of.

Things to watch out for:

• You can’t pull huge sets of data from the FB API. So split it up into chunks like I did in the query above. In the end you should be exe­cut­ing sev­eral FQL queries for each run of the process on a sin­gle fan page.
• Face­book lim­its you to 100 requests every 600 sec ( 10 min). So make sure you grab the excep­tion that is thrown when you break the limit.
• Don’t try to only run the process once a day, it is too unreliable.

Finally

I men­tioned this in my last post that you can con­tact your Account Man­ager and get con­sult­ing hours with Engi­neer­ing Ser­vices.  If you pur­chase as lit­tle as 10 hours then I am con­fi­dent you will save a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of hours of your devel­op­ment time not to men­tion the time you will save in the long term when you have a robust process in place.

As always, post your com­ments or e-mail me at pearcea (at) adobe​.com.  It is your com­ments and e-mails that keep me post­ing and give me ideas for future posts.