Overview
Facebook gives people, businesses, and organizations the power to share and connect with the world, and it plays a role in many companies’ strategies. With a Facebook/Grow integration, you can measure and streamline your company's impact in your social circle. Facebook Social is Grow’s integration that allows you to get more actionable data from Facebook’s API.
Contents in This Article
Features
| Acquisition Method |
State |
| Data Warehouse |
Not Yet Supported |
|
Direct Query |
Supported |
How to Connect
Before you get started you will need to obtain your Facebook login information.
Here are the steps to connect your Facebook account to Grow:
- Click on the Data tab at the top left of the global navigation. Then click on "Connections" in the Data Library section.
- Click on the blue "Connect" button and search for Facebook Social.
- Click on the Facebook logo.
- A window will pop up to log in with your Facebook credentials (if not, please make sure you have pop-ups enabled for Grow). After entering your credentials you will see a green confirmation message that the connection has been made.
NOTE: In order to see or select certain pages from within the Grow app, you will need to ensure that the Facebook user you are connecting with has the following permissions:
- Manage Pages
- Read Insights
- Read Ads
- Business Management
- Pages Show List
Direct Query
Support Status
| Direct Query |
Currently supported with no projection to stop maintaining |
Building a Metric
To help get you started in using the Facebook Social integration, here's a quick tutorial for building a metric that tracks the net new followers to your Facebook page. It also briefly covers the different parameters you can select when pulling in a custom report.
Endpoints
Below is a list of the Metric Categories you can pull from Facebook Social:
- Page and Post Stories
- Page Impressions
- Page Engagement
- Page Reactions
- Page CTA Clicks
- Page User Demographics
- Page Content
- Page Views
- Page Video Views
- Page Posts
- Page Post Impressions
- Page Post Engagement
- Page Post Reactions
- Page Video Posts
The Metric menu that populates after your Metric Category selection will differ depending on the Metric Category you selected.
API Documentation
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/v12.0/insights
This is for reference only; you should not need to consult this to use the connection in Grow.
FAQs + Tips and Tricks
What is the difference between Facebook and Facebook Social?
Grow’s Facebook Social integration is a more robust integration than Grow’s original Facebook integration. While they both access the same API, Facebook Social allows you to pull data in a manner similar to Grow’s Facebook Ads integration. While the Facebook integration has specific reports and endpoints on what you can pull into Grow, Facebook Social allows you the flexibility of having “metric categories,” then filtering further within that category.
Why is my report not including today?
Facebook's API has a few reports that do not report up to the current day. This includes: Demographics about People who like your Page, Number of People Talking About by City, Number of People Talking About by Country, Total People who liked by City, Total People who liked by Country, Page Views, Page Views from users logged into Facebook, and Page Like Sources. For these reports, the most current data Facebook's API returns is from a day or two in the past.
Why am I not seeing one of my managed Facebook Pages in the list?
Double check that you have granted permission for Grow to access your data. To do this, follow these instructions:
- Sign in to your Facebook account.
- Click on the drop-down arrow in the upper right-hand corner of your page and select Settings.
- In the menu on the left of the page that pulls up, select Apps.
- Under App Settings, find the section titled Logged in with Facebook.
- Hover over Grow BI Dashboard, then click on the Edit Settings pencil icon that appears.
- Scroll down to the section titled “This App Can,” and make sure “Manage your Pages” and “Show a list of the Pages you manage” are checked. If not, check those circles, then click Save.
- Go ahead and try again in Grow. The list of Facebook pages you manage will appear there.
Can I get Followers and Likes? I only see Fans.
The "Page Fans" endpoint that is available through Facebook's Graph API is the same as the page Likes. The API does not include an aggregated Follower count.
Why do I see blank columns for some of my posts?
When Grow fetches insights from the Facebook Graph API, Facebook returns all posts in which your Facebook account is referenced. If your Facebook account doesn't have permission to view insights from the posting entity, Facebook fetches these posts but any columns containing insights (i.e., post_impressions) will return blanks. Below are several scenarios in which this may occur:
- Posts that are generated from other Facebook accounts which mention your account.
- The given account isn’t allowed to access insights for that specific post due to the post's specific permissions
- The post has been deleted
- The Facebook account owner has turned off all integrations with apps.
- The Facebook account owner has revoked permissions for one or more of the following, which is required to see or select certain pages from within the Grow app:
- Manage Pages
- Read Insights
- Read Ads
- Business Management
- Pages Show List
I'm not seeing the correct number for "likes" or "page_fans"
This is how the Facebook Graph Insights API is set up; sometimes it takes more than 24 hours for the total "likes", or "page_fans" to update. See here: https://developers.facebook.
What are the limitations for getting data from Facebook?
Facebook's Graph API has the following Page Insights limitations posted in their API documentation (link):
-
Page Insights data is only available on Pages with 100 or more likes.
-
Most metrics will update once every 24 hours.
-
Only the last two years of insights data is available.