As of July 2022, Facebook is the largest social media platform globally, with 2.93 billion monthly active users worldwide. 60.42% of the world’s active internet users access Facebook monthly. 

Facebook may not be the social network of choice for teenagers, but it can still claim dominance in the overall social media market. This makes the platform an essential destination for creators and businesses catering to the creator economy. 

In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook is changing its focus from news to building a creator economy and has reportedly reallocated resources from Facebook News. 

This has made integration with Facebook necessary for developers working in the creator economy. In this article, we discuss the basics of Facebook API integration, the challenges for developers, and the solutions for developers of the creator economy.  

Why do companies need Facebook creator data?

Currently, social media creators’ identities are limited to platforms like Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc. They have little to no identity outside. Creators want to break free of barriers and use their hard-earned reputation as part of their identity outside these platforms. 

On the other hand, developers building for the creator economy want a solution that allows them to quickly and easily verify a large pool of creators across various platforms to go to market as soon as possible.

The current practice of confirming identities and other social media metrics via screenshots, emails, and phone calls is too tedious, time-consuming, and not scalable. Developers need access to the creator’s first-party data directly from the source platform, so they don’t need to worry about authenticity and verification.‍

How to get Facebook data?

Developers get access to Facebook data in one of three ways:

1. Scraping Data

 Many data scraping agencies provide information about creators’ publicly available data. Even though fairly popular, data scraping comes with its own limitations. 

• First of all, social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram etc. don’t like their data being scrapped. They put boundaries and anti-scraping tools to minimize the outflow of information. This means that the data from scraping is unreliable.

• The data scraping method doesn’t give access to the post-login information of creators, such as post impressions. Many brands rely on such metrics for their campaigns.

• You don’t get data from the underlying source platform. Features like audience profiles are often approximations and often vary wildly from one third-party agency to others.

• Brands and influencer marketing programs are left with the onus of verification of data. 

2. Pseudo login

A more reliable way of getting creators’ data is via pseudo logins. In this method, agencies provide a secure login environment where they take social media login credentials from consenting creators. This allows them to get access to even the personal data of creators. 

However, social media platforms like Facebook make pseudo-logins more and more complex every day, making it a non-reliable solution. 

3. API integration: 

API integration is a reliable and consent-driven way of getting creator data from social media platforms. 

This method can provide developers with first-party data of Facebook creators, including post login/private data. Data pointers visible only to the creators from Facebook include:

• Views
• Impressions & Reach
• Audience demographics
• Content consumption metrics - Video view duration, saves, shares, etc.
• Direct content URLs - Enable you to import content into your platforms easily

Challenges with direct Facebook API integration for developers

Even though API integration is the best possible method for data collection from Facebook, many organizations still hesitate to take this route. This is because of the following reasons:

• Developers must go through the entire Facebook documentation to search for specific data points. Even when they fetch the data point, taking approvals and then executing it takes a lot of time. 

• To access data and pass annual audits from social media platforms, companies need to create a lot of infrastructure for security. This is a lengthy and costly process for growing companies.

• If a company wants to access data from various social media platforms, it will need to build separate infrastructure for each platform.

• In case a company decides to add or move to a different social media platform, the existing infrastructure for platform-specific API integration would be of no use.

The Challenges With Facebook API integration

• Creators need to link a Facebook page to suffice the login requirements mandatorily.

• FB APIs undergo frequent version changes; this requires a lot of effort to maintain integrations.

• Unlike Instagram, the number of endpoints to be Integrated to fetch Facebook data is relatively higher, along with an increased number of permissions. This makes integrating and managing data more complex.

Using Phyllo Facebook API integration to get creator-consented data

‍Phyllo is the simplest and most effective way to get creator data. Phyllo provides a single API to get continuous access to verified, creator-permissioned data across hundreds of platforms. Phyllo has currently integrated with platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, Patreon, Spotify, and Instagram with our coverage expanding every day.

Phyllo provides the following creator data:

- Profile data

- Content feeds

- Audience demographics

- Content views

-  All content types - posts, videos, and images

Phyllo provides:

• Identity API:  Verifies a creator's identity and returns unique information such as name, email id, etc., depending upon the source platform.
• Engagement API: Provides data about a creator’s content and reputation from the source platform. like subscribers, followers, comments, etc.
• Income API: Gives the income and transaction-level data from a creator or independent work platform.

Here is a list of tools that developers get access to once they integrate with Facebook. Find them in detail here: 

List of Facebook Developer Tools

Here are all the products Facebook offers for developers:

-Business Tools

-Open Source

-Gaming

-Social media integrations

-Artificial Intelligence 

-AR/VR

In order to access the tools above, developers use the Facebook Graph API. 

Facebook Graph APIs: Uses and Functionality

The Graph API is the primary way to get data from Facebook. It's an HTTP-based API that developers use to programmatically query data, post new stories, manage ads, upload photos, and perform other tasks. 

The Facebook Graph API is composed of nodes, edges, and fields. Developers can use nodes to get data about specific objects, use edges to get collections of objects on a single object, and use fields to get data about each object in a collection.

 Here are some ways in which developers can use Facebook Graph APIs:

1. Page insights: 

With Facebook Graph API, developers can query data and build dashboards to understand your page and audience better. For example, one can figure out which writers and what type of posts get the most likes.

2. Audience insights:

You can also use the Facebook API to understand your audience better. You can collect the demographics of your page visitors and understand their requirements, likes, and dislikes to ultimately provide a better experience. 

3. Advertisement information:

You can use the Facebook API to manage ads as well. You can retrieve the content or creatives of an ad account with a single request. One can also get ad reports of their ad account. 

4. Post live videos:

The Facebook API allows users to post live videos to Pages, Groups, and User timelines from your app. 

5. Embed Facebook feeds:

You can use the Facebook API to embed public Facebook pages, posts, and videos into your application or website. 

6. Access and post content in Facebook Groups:

With the Facebook API, you can let people publish content from your app to their Group. You can also help them get information about content posted to their Group and insights about activities happening in their Group.

7. Access Instagram:

The Facebook API allows your app to access Instagram Graph API's Hashtag Search endpoints. This enables your product to discover photos and videos using your hashtags, understand the public sentiment around your brand, and identify contest, competition, and sweepstakes entrants.

 9. Benchmark Competition:

With the Facebook API, you can access and read public data for Facebook Pages that you are not the admin of. This data, including business metadata, public comments, and posts, can be used for competitive analysis and benchmarking. 

With so many use cases, it is no wonder that businesses are focussing more and more on integrating with Facebook. Here are some of the platforms that businesses get access to when they integrate with the platform:

Facebook API Integration for Businesses

 With Facebook APIs, businesses get access to these featured platforms:

• Facebook Messenger: It provides a personalized and convenient user experience so that brands can generate leads, drive sales, and provide customer service. 
• ‍Facebook login: This allows billions of Facebook users worldwide to log in to your website or application.
• ‍Instagram access: You can create products for creators, users, and businesses on Instagram.
• ‍WhatsApp Business: Developers can create a highly personalized and quick-to-implement chat or support function on people’s favored way of communication.  

With access to several platforms, many businesses from the domain of influencer marketing, fintech, web 3, and creator tools are looking to integrate with Facebook APIs. To know more about how Phyllo is helping out such businesses, read here.

Also read: How Beacons uses Phyllo to create the perfect media kit for creators to be successful

What about Creator Data Compliance?

Recent data privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA have put a massive focus on consented data. The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 gives consumers more control over the personal information that businesses collect about them; this includes:

• The right to know about the personal information a business collects about them and how it is used and shared;
• The right to delete personal information collected from them (with some exceptions);
• The right to opt-out of the sale of their personal information; and
• The right to non-discrimination for exercising their CCPA rights.

Businesses are required to give consumers certain notices explaining their privacy practices. The CCPA applies to many businesses, including social media platforms.

Social media platforms like Facebook have become more and more restrictive while handling data, as they try to comply with the ever-changing restrictions.

Phyllo not only provides consented data from creators, but it also eliminates the need for developers to be updated with such compliances. Phyllo takes care of region and platform-specific restrictions so that developers can focus on creating products on top of available data.

Conclusion

In the first-ever creator-week held by Meta, Mark Zuckerberg said:

“I think that any good vision of the future has to involve a lot more people being able to make a living by expressing their creativity and by doing things they want to do, rather than things they have to — and having the tools and the economy around them to support their work is critical.”

Facebook is betting big on the creator economy with a planned $1 billion investment by the end of 2022. With its huge user base, Facebook would be one of the most valuable platforms for creators and companies in the creator economy.

If you want to integrate with Facebook and other social media platforms with a single API, schedule a call with us today.