Python HOW: Getting Facebook Data and Insights Using facebook-sdk

Gabriel Harris Ph.D.

Feb 19, 2019·4 min read

At the end of this article you will learn how to get valuable data and insights of a page you’re an admin. It assumes you’ve already obtained a permanent page token. If you’ve not, check my 👉 article first

TL;DR: full code

The Graph API 🍇

Data in FB is represented using the idea of a “social graph”. To interact with a graph we use an HTTPS-based API called the Graph API. To return a graph object using the obtained page token:

A graph is made up of 3 hierarchical components:

1. A node which is an individual object with a unique ID
2. An edge which is a connection between one node and another
3. Fields which are node properties

Example 1: a page object is a node, all its posts are edges, and the page’s about and category are some of its fields

Example 2: a post object is a node, all its comments are edges, and the post’s creation time and message are some of its fields

Page Data 🎯

To read the page as a node, we use the get_object method with the page ID:

By default, this returns the name and id fields, but we can use the fields parameter to specify fields:

Page Insights 🔍

The insights object returns very valuable data for a single metric for a day, a week, 28 days, or for life time (depending on the metric). Insights is available for more than a 100 metrics so check them out here

To get the page insights for a specific metric, we use get_connections with insights as the connection_name, and specifying the metric

The following insights return the number of times any content from my Page or about my Page entered a person’s screen during the week before yesterday:

Latest Posts IDs

To get data from any post, we need to get the post’s ID, and also the ID of any uploaded photo or video attached to the post (i.e. object ID). Also, it’s very useful to get the post’s type, name, and creation time

To do this, we can either use:

1. get_object with the page ID and posts as the fields parameter:

This will only return the latest 25 posts. To specify the number of returned posts we can use the limit method of field:

2. get_connections with the page ID and posts as the connection_name. We used the fields parameter here as normal:

This will only return the latest 25 posts

All/Specific Posts IDs

To iterate over all the posts of the page, get_all_connections can be used to create a generator object that yields all individual posts. However, we would probably be more interested in posts during a specific period of time

For this task we can use the since and until parameters which expect a datatime object in the format (year, month, day). For example to get all posts info for this year:

Post data

Let’s first get the most 2 recent posts info:

Now let’s get the first post data using either:

1. get_object with the first post ID and the required fields:

2. get_connections with the first post ID and the required connection_name . This is preferable as it has extra parameters for some edges. For example, for comments, we can include hidden comments, order them from newest to latest, include sub-comments, and show a total count summary:

You can do something similar using likes and reactions as the connection_name , along with parameters for likes or reactions

Post Insights

We can do this as we did to get the Page Insight but using the post ID instead of the page ID, and choosing a metric for posts from the available metrics

The following insights return the total count of stories created about the most recent post, by action type since the post was created up to yesterday:

Video Post Insights

There’re special metrics for video insights. To use them we need to use video_insights as the connection_name with the object ID (NOT the post or page ID as before)

The following insights return the total count the video in the second recent post was viewed so far:

TL;DR: full code

Two full codes to extract insights are on my GitHub here, which includes:

• handle_tokens.py Check my 👉 article first to learn about tokens
• PageApp.py that extracts daily insights for your page, over one month period that you can specify in the main function. Insights include demographics, impressions, engagement, and reactions. The result is a csv file
• PostApp.py that gets all the posts published over one month period that you can specify in the main function. For each post a number of insights are extracted. For video posts, additional insights are automatically extracted. The result is a csv file

Happy coding!