[Air-L] Facebook researchers: how do you get a list of users who like a page?

Deen Freelon dfreelon at gmail.com
Sun Mar 3 15:49:54 PST 2013


Andrew,

If you know how to query the Facebook API you can pull the names and 
userids of all users whose profile you can view with your access token 
who have liked any public post. You access the data by appending 
"/likes" to any FB graph object id that can be liked (photos, comments, 
wall posts, etc.) and paging through the results until there are none left.

Here's an example: 
https://graph.facebook.com/10150146071831729/likes?limit=100 (100 is the 
max N of results FB returns in a single API call and allows you to pull 
results faster). Note that in nearly all cases, you will pull fewer 
names than the total N of likes the API lists--this is due to some users 
having privacy settings that prevent outsiders from viewing their likes.

Best, ~DEEN

On 3/3/2013 6:24 PM, Andrew Roback wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I am researching NPOs that use Facebook, and I'm trying to compile a
> network of users who like individual NPO FB pages. I have tried to get a
> list of users who like the NPO FB pages using two importers (NodeXL and
> netvizz), but these tools only download user-post networks and do not
> provide a list of all users who like the page (at least I didn't see that
> option).
>
> I recently read that Facebook restricts this option in the API due to
> privacy concerns<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3546320/how-to-list-facebook-users-who-like-a-page-or-interest>,
> and I noticed that the "like" class in
> FQL<http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/like>only
> returns lists for objects like posts, photos, etc.
>
> Does anyone have a tool or method for using the API to get this data?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Andrew
>


-- 
Deen Freelon, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
American University School of Communication
Office: Asbury 228A
dfreelon at gmail.com
http://dfreelon.org




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