Question

I have looked through and couldn’t find the answer on here…

We are doing a promotional giveaway and have a ton of addresses of people trying to get free stuff. What we want to do is give the people who post most on our facebook wall a better chance of winning.

So I am trying to set something up (I’m guessing using Graphs API/FQL) that will pull the name of the person who posted to our wall or commented on one of our posts. If I can get a list like this, I have enough php/mysql experience that I can create the code to compare the name with the database and weight their entry.

Does anyone have a simple explanation on the code to pull just the names of the people who posted each time?

Thank you so much for your help!!

Answer 1

Using FQL you can get the ids of those who posted on your page wall:

SELECT post_id, actor_id
FROM stream
WHERE source_id = "PAGE_ID"

and those who commented on posts:

SELECT post_id, fromid
FROM comment
WHERE post_id = "POST_ID"

You also should be able to combine them:

SELECT post_id, fromid
FROM comment
WHERE post_id IN (SELECT post_id
                  FROM stream
                  WHERE source_id = "PAGE_ID")

Once you have the ids you can simply query: https://graph.facebook.com/USER_ID and get the name of the user.
If you have too many and don’t want to issue a request per one you might want to consider using the Batch Requests option.