Facebook Posts
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Facebook Posts

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Article summary

Facebook Posts provide information such as the number of likes, comments, and shares that a post receives, the demographic information of the users who engage with the post, the reach and engagement rate of the post, and the times and days when the post is most effective.

If you have multiple Facebook accounts and would like to extract the same data from all of them, it's possible through multi-account extraction. Contact our Solutions team to enable this feature.

It's also possible to extract your Facebook Video data through our Facebook Posts connector.

Authorize Connection to Facebook Posts

To authorize this service, use OAuth 2.0 to share specific data with Dataddo while keeping usernames, passwords, and other information private.

  1. On the Authorizers page, click on Authorize New Service and select your service.
  2. Follow the on-screen prompts to grant Dataddo the necessary permissions to access and retrieve your data.
  3. [Optional] Once your authorizer is created, click on it to change the label for easier identification.

Ensure that the account you're granting access to holds at least admin-level permissions. If necessary, assign a team member with the required permissions with the authorizer role to authenticate the service for you.

The best practice is to create a dedicated Admin System User in Facebook Business Manager. For more details, refer to the official Facebook documentation for further details.

For more information, see our article on authorizers.

How to Create a Facebook Posts Data Source

  1. On the Sources page, click on the Create Source button and select the connector from the list.
  2. From the drop-down menu, select your authorizer.
    Didn't find your authorizer?

    Click on Add new Account at the bottom of the drop-down and follow the on-screen prompts. You can also go to the Authorizers tab and click on Add New Service.

  3. Name your data source and select your metrics and attributes.
  4. [Optional] Configure your advanced settings. If you are unsure with how to proceed, we recommend skipping this step.
  5. Configure your sync frequency or set the exact synchronization time under Show advanced settings.
  6. Preview your data by clicking on the Test Data button in the top right corner. You can adjust the date range for a more specific time frame.
  7. Click on Save and congratulations, your new data source is ready!


Limitations

Number of Posts

Under normal circumstances, the Facebook Posts API allows up to 100 posts to be extracted per call.

To overcome this limitation, Dataddo supports automatic pagination to make multiple calls and retrieve all your data.

However, in some cases the Facebook API will not return all 100 requested posts. In this case, reduce the value set in the limit parameter.

Number of Records

The Facebook Posts API will let you extract up to 5,000 records per call.

Only Lifetime Values

Only lifetime values of the metrics are available through the Facebook Posts API. Please note that

  • The data cannot be broken down by days.
  • It is possible to extract only the number of impressions or clicks.

You are provided with the total aggregated value of the given metric to the date and will not be provided with the daily (weekly, monthly) deltas. This means there is no historical data to extract.

Example

DateTotal Clicks
Jan 11 000
Jan 21 053

As we see the total number, this means that on Jan 2 there were 53 clicks.

DATADDO TIP

To build a time series for each metric, set the snapshot-taking frequency to daily and choose to Append your snapshots.

Add the Insert date attribute in the connector configuration. This will add an additional timestamp, indicating the date to which the value of the metric is fixed.

Troubleshooting

Data Preview Unavailable

No data preview when you click on Test Data might be caused by an issue with your source configuration. The most common causes are:

  • Date range: Try a smaller date range. You can load the rest of your data afterward using manual data load.
  • Insufficient permissions: Please make sure your authorized account has at least admin-level permissions.
  • Invalid metrics, attributes, or breakdowns: You may not have any data for the selected metrics, attributes, or breakdowns.
  • Incompatible combination of metrics, attributes, or breakdowns: Your selected combination cannot be queried together. Please refer to the service's documentation to view a full list of metrics that can be included in the same data source.

Authorization Error

If your Facebook source is broken, check the extraction log to see the details of the issue.

  1. Go to Sources, click on the three dots and choose Test Extraction.
  2. For the following error messages, reauthorize the service (Facebook).
    "response_status": "401 Unauthorized"
    
    "Www-Authenticate": "OAuth \"Facebook Platform\" \"invalid_token\" \"You cannot access the app till you log in to www.facebook.com and follow the instructions given.\""
    
    "response_body": "{\"error\":{\"message\":\"You cannot access the app till you log in to www.facebook.com and follow the instructions given.\",\"type\":\"OAuthException\",\"code\":190,\"error_data\":\"{\\\"checkpoint_url\\\":\\\"https:\\\\\\/\\\\\\/www.facebook.com\\\"}\",\"error_subcode\":459,\"fbtrace_id\":\"AUWZQsg7Opr7SEpp_lk9wUa\"}}"
    
  3. Restart the broken sources by clicking on the Manual Data Load icon next to your source.
    Facebook - authorization error log 2

Unable to Find Facebook Sub Accounts

If your access rights have changed or you gained access to a new Facebook account, it's possible that your other accounts will not be immediately listed in Dataddo. To fix this, please try the following:

Fully Reauthorize the Service

  1. Go to the Authorizers tab in Dataddo and delete the Facebook authorizer.
    Deleting an Authorizer

    Please keep in mind that you will first need to delete all sources created with the authorizer. This will also affect your flows.

  2. Go to your Facebook settings and navigate to the Business integrations tab.
  3. Find Dataddo and click on Remove.
  4. Now, go back to the Authorizers tab in Dataddo and authorize your Facebook account again.

Check Your Account Permissions
If the method above doesn't work, please check your Facebook account's permissions. To access insights, make sure the permissions are at least on the analyst/admin level.

Hashtags Extraction

It's not possible to extract only hashtags associated with your posts.

A way around is is to add the Captions data label when creating your data source as hashtags are always part of all captions.

Invalid Insights Metric

ERROR MESSAGE
The value must be a valid insights metric.

This issue is caused by some endpoints being deprecated after April 18, 2024 when Graph API was updated to v19. The following fields now no longer return data:

  • page_video_views_10s
  • page_video_views_10s_paid
  • page_video_views_10s_organic
  • page_video_views_10s_autoplayed
  • page_video_views_10s_click_to_play
  • page_video_views_10s_unique
  • page_video_views_10s_repeat
  • post_video_views_10s
  • post_video_views_10s_unique
  • post_video_views_10s_autoplayed
  • post_video_views_10s_clicked_to_play
  • post_video_views_10s_organic
  • post_video_views_10s_paid
  • post_video_views_10s_sound_on

These fields will be removed or replaced by their substitutes where available, however, if your source is still broken, please restart it.

Related Articles

Now that you have successfully created a data source, see how you can connect your data to a dashboarding app or a data storage.

Sending Data to Dashboarding Apps

Sending Data to Data Storages

Other Resources


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