I spent a while trying to find the best way to export a public Facebook pages posts in the form of an RSS feed. Facebook don’t provide an easy way to do this (only on Notifications, e.g. facebook.com/notifications.php), although it can be done with a workaround in 2 different ways.

Via Twitter

You can connect a Facebook page to Twitter and any new posts will automatically be sent to a Twitter account you specify (you can do this through facebook.com/twitter/). With this carried out, you can then access the RSS feed of the Twitter account. This works but confines you to the 140 characters limit and will include a link back to the original Facebook post within the tweet.

The long way round

Another way would be to make a system to automatically create an RSS feed from the Facebook pages JSON feed (example: https://graph.facebook.com/pagename or id/feed). This has the benefit of displaying your Facebook posts in full. The downside is of course the extra work and complication involved.

The challenge is to make the correct decisions when adding social media features, it’s all too easy to add 20 ‘sharing’ buttons to a page when trying to cover all the bases and end up creating an awful user experience. The key is to know which social media services demographics best match the demographics and the type of info being shared by a company or organisation. Basically trying to find a best fit, if one exists.

Facebook

Facebook over the past 2 years has grown to become a huge social platform. They have 500 million registered members, and 200+ million of those use it through mobile devices and both stats are growing steadily (see www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics). A wide variety of age groups use Facebook, although it is heavily slanted towards teenagers and ’20-somethings’, this is changing gradually though as Facebook becomes synonymous with using the Internet.

Age Range: All (13 y/o’s and over).
Location: Generally US, Europe and South America have very high use, although it is quickly spreading in Asia, Middle East and beyond.

Marketing with Facebook can be carried out via 2 main methods:
Fan Pages allow standard Facebook users to ‘Like’ them, which means that anything published to the Fan Page will be seen by everyone who has ‘Liked’ it. This creates a valuable communication stream which is best used with weekly/bi-weekly updates to ensure regular contact, although it’s important to make sure you don’t spam the user as you’ll likely dilute the usefulness of the tool and/or lose them as a ‘fan’. There is also a spin-off of this whereby users can allowed to ‘Share’ or ‘Like’ specific webpages, which is used to good effect on news items, video or other similar individual pieces of content. A good example of this is the ability to share a video on YouTube to your Facebook account.

Facebook Ads allow an advertiser to focus ads to Facebook users via specific demographics such as age, location and interests. Due to Facebook users supplying this information via their profiles this helps to make advertising as pin-point as is possible on the internet at the moment, which is much more accurate than almost all over alternatives.

Twitter

Twitter is similar in some respects to Facebook, but has some key differences. Twitter is designed for much more verbose communication with a 140 character limit, and an emphasis on time sensitivity. Twitter has ~150 million registered users, although its churn rate (the number of users that sign up and don’t use their account again) is widely regarded as being far higher than Facebook. Twitter stats.

Age Range: All (13 y/o’s and over).
Location: Significant usage almost everywhere.

Marketing is generally best done via encouraging retweeting (which is the equivalent of repeating a specific piece of information, thus adding kudos). This is often described as something ‘going viral’ on the internet. Twitter is used to publicise pretty much anything, although it’s best used as bait (due to the limited number of characters) to link to breaking news or similar situations.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is primarily used for professional contacts to build a network of people they know via employment both past and present. There are 80 million users, although 40 million are based in the US which weaken its appeal outside of the US. LinkedIn stats.

Age Range: All (18 y/o’s and over).
Location: Significant usage US mostly, but still common in Europe.

Marketing can be carried out similarily to Facebook, by allowing people to share content to LinkedIn this content would then be visible to all of their contacts. Marketing aimed towards LinkedIn (due to the nature of LinkedIn) is best done for any information that is work related, thus is more niche than what you would share on Facebook.

Conclusions

Each service is significantly different, in some cases all 3 may be useful to visitors if a website has a wide range of content but is unlikely. Try not to clog a website with 100 ways to share content when only 2 are really popular as you’ll sacrifice a lot of page space and confuse some users, not to mention increase page loading times.

Step 1 – Find the page feed for the Fan Page
The basic URL format of a Facebook fan page feed is:

https://graph.facebook.com/ID of Page/feed

If you can’t find your unique Page ID read this guide.
Test it by opening the link in another browser window. If you get a whole load of data in square and curly brackets (it’s JSON) that contains posts from your fan page then you’re set for Step 2.

*Please note that this URL gets every post from your Wall/Stream limited to about the 50 most recent from what I’ve seen. This includes everything that other people have posted as well in the form of their posts or comments, etc.

Step 2 – Extract the last status from the feed URL data

Here comes the basic PHP code, you need to put in the Page ID for the

$pageID

variable:

$pageID = "ID of Page"
$url = "https://graph.facebook.com/". $pageID ."/feed";
$json = file_get_contents($url);
$jsonData = json_decode($json);

foreach($jsonData->data as $val) {
	if($val->from->id == $pageID) { //find the first matching post/status by a fan page admin
		$message = $val->message;
		echo $message;
		break; //stop looping on most recent status posted by page admin
	}
}

Things to consider

Extracting the data from Facebook directly using a server-side approach should not be used for production as it’s really inefficient as it adds a noticeable pause to page loading times and will break if Facebook is slow in responding. I provided a basic demo to show how easy it can be done, but you should expand on this by storing the data extracted in a database or file on your server via CRON jobs. Another alternative would be to do it client-side with JavaScript, it depends on the frequency the Fan page data you want is expected to change and what you’re doing with it.

If one of your Friends installs/uses an application, that application is given the same access rights to all of their Friends data (one of them being you!) as they have. This gives the application the opportunity to copy and store very personal information such as date of birth, address, telephone number(s), employment and/or education history (assuming you’ve added it and not limited the access to it). So for every silly, pointless quiz/game that one of your Friends installs/uses it opens all of the data on your profile up for it to misuse.

There is a very simple fix to this though. Delete your profile, all your friends or wait until next year sometime when Facebook implements more stringent controls on data access for applications…