Retrieving Facebook Page Statuses with PHP

Question

Having trawled the web for days, I cannot find an up-to-date, working method to retrieve a list of the latest statuses on a Facebook page.

• On the status section of the Graph API, I am greeted with "This document refers to a feature that was removed after Graph API v2.3"
• I can't get file_get_contents to work on Facebook pages as I'm presented with a Captcha

It's for competitor research, I only actually want:

• Post date
• Number of Likes/Share/Replies

I couldn't care less for the status content itself, just the metrics around it.

A JSON object would be great, but I'll take anything at this stage.

Anyone else managed to get this sort of data or know a way to use file_get_contents on Facebook pages?

Thanks.

Answer 1

A status is just a certain kind of post – so all you need to do is request the page’s feed (resp. posts) instead, and then check if their type is status.

I've just tried to access the post object to get like/favourite counts .etc and get "[message] => (#12) singular statuses API is deprecated for versions v2.4 and higher"

You need to use the “full” post id as you get it from the /feed or /posts endpoint – the combination of page-id, underscore, post-id. (At least that’s the current format, but someone from Facebook told me we should not rely on that, it might change at some point. Best if you really just use the full id, as the endpoint returns it.)

And since you are interested in overall number of likes only, not the individual likes, you could make a request like this,

{full_post_id}?fields=likes.summary(1).limit(0)

That requests the summary (contains total counts), and limits the number of individual likes returned to zero (so as not to request any unnecessary data.) It works the same for comments. But I think for shared posts there is no such counts, you will only get a list of posts (which might not be all, but only those you are allowed to see.)