Question

I am building a social application, users post data to the website, which is saved in our database.

This creates a record on the site, which is searchable and creates the basic content and function of the site (the purpose is not relevant at this point)

When a record is saved to our database, I want to “spread the word” and send this data out to social networks. Currently, I’m looking at Facebook in isolation.

So, I know how to create a post through the Graph API and post this content to the users Timeline, or indeed to a business page associated with the APP/Website.. but I am not sure how, or if indeed one should, maintain continuity.

What I mean… if a user creates a record on my website, and then the website/App creates a post on my business page, and also asks the user to post it in their Timeline, how do I stop this being two separate posts, and instead one post which has been shared?

I want to achieve:

User posts on website
    >
Website posts to Page
    >
Post on Page is "Shared" to users Timeline

As opposed to:

User posts on website
    >
Website posts to Page
    >
Website posts an additional post to users Timeline

The reason I want to do this, is that on the website, I want to be able to show shares, likes and comments from Facebook by tracking the ID of the initial post created when first entered onto my website.

Or am I trying to reinvent the wheel and should just use Facebook’s comment plugin?

Answer 1

When you create the post on facebook on the Page, store the returned post ID in your data model.

From what I can tell, there is no way to access the normal user share directly through the API. If you insist on doing it programmatically without popping up any dialog for your user, you can make a post to the user’s page which has (the start of) the Page post and a linkback to the Page post as an attachment. This is probably to prevent abuse.

However, if you don’t mind relying on an undocumented and deprecated endpoint, you can use the old sharer.php endpoint, so long as you have a fully qualified link to the post you want to share (you can retrieve the url through the api). This will also require your user to enter anything appropriate in their share and then click “share.”

The endpoint is
http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php

Call it with the u parameter filled in with the url, so

http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=[URL encoded URL of the post you wanted to call]

You can try this with any facebook post (go to a post, copy the url, past in as the parameter), it’s still working (I just tried it) but there are no guarantees. See the top answer to Facebook API: "Share" a post already posted on a page's wall?.

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You can still access likes, comments, etc for that post id through the Graph API (and you can provide your users a direct link to the post). Cache/update them as recommended and display them on your own page. You are basically mirroring back onto your own site what is happening on facebook in regards to the post you made.

I would go this route especially if you are at all planning on branching into other services. That way you can do an aggregated display of statistics/likes/etc from the multiple services you are having your platform repost to. This is also good for (at least an impression of) data integrity for your users: they know that your service represents everything they have done in case anything happens to their facebook/etc accounts.

This could especially be noteworthy if they are worried about facebook/etc deleting any of their posts, or for recovering from any issues where a post/comment/etc is not properly stored by facebook/etc (for example, comments have a maximum length which, at least via the main FB UI, silently drops anything above the maximum length in a non recoverable way for the user).