Home/ Questions/Q 8005617
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-04T17:16:49+00:00

Recently, I heard that, with the Facebook Open Graph API, it is possible to

  • 0

Recently, I heard that, with the Facebook Open Graph API, it is possible to post to a user’s newsfeed if they have liked a page.

I have been trying my best to follow along with the example, and have created a dummy page.

As far as I understand it, it is necessary to do the following:

  1. Create the necessary Open Graph tags, including the one for your Facebook app
  2. Add a like button to the page
  3. ‘Like’ the page

  4. Obtain an access token (to post the message)

    curl -F grant_type=client_credentials -F client_id=MY_APP_ID -F client_secret=MY_APP_SECRET -F redirect_uri=https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token

  5. Post to the feed

    curl -F 'access_token=ACCESS_TOKEN_FROM_STEP_4' -F 'message=Hello Likers' -F 'id=http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3618086/test.html' https://graph.facebook.com/feed

It’s at this point that the message should be sent to anyone who liked the page. Instead, I get the following error:

{
    "error": {
        "message": "(#100) http:\/\/dl.dropbox.com\/u\/3618086\/test.html does not resolve to a valid user ID",
        "type": "OAuthException",
        "code":100
    }
}

It’s at this point that I’m confused. I’ve read through these related questions:

And have tried their suggestions, but nothing has been successful. What step am I missing?

I can provide further details; I just didn’t want the question to get too long.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Alright, I figured out my problem. I’m including my solution below for the benefit of others.

    The steps I’ve listed above are indeed correct, but there are a few things that warrant further explanation to avoid the pitfalls that I fell into.

    Posting to people who have liked an item on Facebook

    Step 1: Create a Facebook App

    • You’ll need to visit the Facebook Developers page and create a new application
      • You should not need a namespace, or webhosting for your application
    • Fill out the details for your application
      • Primarily, you’ll need to select “Website with Facebook Login”. The site URL should be the same as where your site is hosted. In my example, I am hosting in my dropbox shared folder, so I used http://dropbox.com
      • Set your App Domain to the hostname of your site URL. In my case, this is dropbox.com which will allow Facebook to use *.dropbox.com. I also could have done dl.dropbox.com specifically.

    Step 2: Create the dummy page

    It is very important that you create a dummy page. I found that most of my problems were caused by setting up the initial page wrong. If you create a dummy page, you can experiment (or at least create another dummy page) until everything is working.

    • Make sure that your page is correct, especially the open graph tags. What does correct look like? You can check out my dummy page, but I’ve included the <HEAD> below:

      <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html lang="en" xml:lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml" xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#">
<head>
    <title>Test</title>
    <link href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3618086/test2.html" rel="canonical" />
    <meta property="fb:app_id" content="YOUR_APP_ID">

    <meta property="og:type" content="product">
    <meta property="og:title" content="PAGE TITLE" /> 
    <meta property="og:description" content="PAGE DESCRIPTION" /> 
    <meta property="og:image" content="http://www.stanford.edu/group/cardinalballet/Pictures/WebsitePics/portrait-placeholder.jpg">

    <meta property="og:site_name" content="SITE_NAME"/>
    <meta property="og:url" content="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3618086/test2.html">
</head>
      • The critical piece of this are the fb:app_id (which should be your Facebook application id), and og:type. There are multiple types, and certain ones don’t have publish permissions. For more information, visit the Open Graph API documentation. I initially liked my page when it was an article, which caused many of the problems that I had.
      • You can also check the page for Open Graph errors using the Open Graph Debugger

    • Add the like button to the page, along with the Facebook SDK.

    Step 3: Like the page

    The most straightforward part of the entire process. Visit your dummy page, and press the Like button.

    Step 4: Send a message

    Assuming that you’ve done the previous steps correctly, the last bit should also be straightforward. I use curl in my example, but you should be able to get it using any sort of POST request.

    • Obtain an access token. 

      curl -F grant_type=client_credentials -F client_id=MY_APP_ID -F client_secret=MY_APP_SECRET -F redirect_uri=https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token

    • Obtain the id of your product page.

      curl -g https://graph.facebook.com/\?id\=PAGE_URL

    • Post a message to all people who liked your product page.

      curl -F 'access_token=ACCESS_TOKEN' -F 'message=MESSAGE' -F 'id=ID_FROM_PREVIOUS_ACTION' https://graph.facebook.com/feed

    Step 5: Success!

    At this point, hopefully everything has gone well. As the user who liked the page, check out their news feed. You should see a post with the title, image, and description that were on your page. Hooray.

    …And that’s how I solved it. Hopefully this will be valuable to other people. I would be glad to elaborate if I have missed any details.

    • 0