Facebook Leading the Way
Blog Assignment 4: The Facebook Graph API
Facebook has been one of the leading Social websites on the Internet. It is also a website owners greatest friend when you learn to integrate all the different APIs into your personal site or blog. How better to capture your niche market of active members linking them back and forth with “like” and “follow”.
“One Year Later” the article written by Jeff Ente, now has us ironically at two. Even that Facebook has made changes to “TimeLine”, extracting information from Facebook has gotten easier. You just have to be prepared to update and embrace the codes as they change directions a little bit.
The Open Graph has been my recall friend prior to “TimeLine”, and it still has great recall properties of personal data such as; likes, groups, friends, movies, music, books, notes, photos, videos, events, tags and so much more. Whenever I want to remember a music video I posted several weeks ago I use the “graph” URL for music. This saves a lot of scrolling through endless wall feeds, especially if you are a frequent poster with friends who love to comment.
A brief snippet of code looks something like this for me:
“data”: [
{ “name”: “Corinne Bailey Rae”, “category”: “Musician/band”, “id”: “18739903176″, “created_time”: “2012-04-23T07:08:43+0000″ },
{ “name”: “Van Morrison (Official)”, “category”: “Musician/band”, “id”: “243835092320875″, “created_time”: “2012-04-15T01:07:11+0000″ },
{ “name”: “Sinead O’Connor”, “category”: “Musician/band”, “id”: “246972478675081″, “created_time”: “2012-03-27T03:48:22+0000″ },
{ “name”: “Diana Ross”, “category”: “Musician/band”, “id”: “374654685883″, “created_time”: “2012-03-26T17:52:46+0000″ },
{ “name”: “Bob Seger”, “category”: “Musician/band”, ”id”: “21454949640″, “created_time”: “2012-03-25T16:55:41+0000″ }
One developer for WordPress created a plugin that pulled Facebook using the graph scripts. http://www.entula.net/wordpress-facebook-grabber/ I used and incorporated this script for an entertainment and arts website. It allows for example, writing an article about a theater, artist, musician and link back to their public Facebook fan page pulling in a selected number of photo images posting it within your article. This is just one way to use the tool in a creative commons way as others who have photographs may restrict them with privacy permissions.
On my website blog, http://RestoreToLife.com, it utilizes the community Joomla “JomSocial” component that allow users to sign-in using the “Facebook Login Button” code. You can see an example here: http://restoretolife.com/community.html
You will also notice that throughout my web blog, http://DebbyMajor.com, I use several Facebook Social Plugins:
- Like Button: This is great for people who read your articles to like it, whereas their action post it back to their Facebook wall for their friends to see and hopefully follow it as well.
- Send Button: This is great for those who like to send to friends more privately. This is a must for those who are particular about what they post on their wall. Having this on your website blog is essential to have and is much different than the “Like Button”. Lets say the article is about liposuction and you wanted a friend to know more information about it. Then the send button allows you to share the page more privately in a message without anyone else seeing it.
- Follow Button: I think this is a bloggers best friend. What better way than to make sure your blog traffic knows where you are hanging out at? Yep you are right, Facebook. The benefits are that you do not have to depend on too much text than a simple familiar button.
- Comments: Having a Facebook Comment section is good strategy for actively engaging users. One should never underestimate the network potential of commenting on other pages. Importantly every time a person is commenting they are leaving a link back to your page. It increases blog traffic. It is a B2B winning combination. Talk about lead generation.
These tools improve brand recognition. It is great customer service tool as well as customer retention. I recommend not only using these tools but understanding all the benefits. To learn even more go to the Facebook Developer’s page, https://developers.facebook.com/, it will keep you informed with other techniques and social platforms that are networking as well.
