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Counting "Real" Likes on any URL – Evaluating the Salt Lake City vs. Fresno Campaign

Posted on January 3, 2011 by jessestay

In the last week I saw one of the most amazing campaigns of unity amongst 2 communities, Salt Lake City, Utah, where I live and where I asked for your help, and Fresno, California. Both cities were entered into Walmart’s “Fighting Hunger Together” campaign in a race to get the most “likes”. The prize? 1 million dollars donated to the Food Bank of the community with the most “likes”. $100,000 would be donated to each of the next 5 communities with the most “likes”. Thanks to yours, and others’ help, both Salt Lake City and Fresno seemed to take off the most. Both cities launched media blitzes, a telethon of sorts, that telethon lasting more than 3 days, begging viewers, listeners, and readers to like their communities in hopes to rally the individual community to earn their cool $1 million towards the hungry and homeless. I don’t know of a TV or Radio station in Utah that wasn’t talking about this every 15 minutes or so. Campaigns were even set up to help people set up their Facebook accounts, and then close them when the campaign was done! It was a Christmas Miracle to see both communities fighting so hard to win, Fresno outranking Salt Lake City by around 200,000 votes at one point, but Salt Lake City sprinting to the finish, obliterating the competition. In the end, Salt Lake City rallied, soliciting over 5 million votes, completely overshadowing Fresno at second place by over 1 million votes. The third place city didn’t even eclipse 500,000 likes.

The real story though is how each city grew their “likes”. Walmart was counting “likes” by the total on the like button embedded in the website. You can see that still on my previous article soliciting your help (click the link), something any website can embed using Facebook Social Plugins (I also included the HTML so others could embed it on their sites). The “like buttons” tally votes by the number of shares of the URL, followed by the total number of comments on each share. It’s hardly a count of the total number of people that actually liked the post, and some would argue, not a fair tally. Fresno was even calling foul, perhaps out of jealousy, that Salt Lake City was using tactics such as creating Fake profiles, sharing the page thousands of times, and encouraging others to click through and like each share on the Fake profile. Of course, Fresno was doing the same. It was rather ironic that in the end Salt Lake’s total “likes” exceeded the total population of Utah as a whole! I’m sure it could be possible, especially considering bloggers like myself were sharing outside of Utah to solicite votes, but hardly believable. Of course, Fresno was in the same boat.

There is a way however, for anybody to get the “real” tally of votes for a URL with Facebook Graph API. It turns out with Graph API you can pass a URL to it to get the ID and additional information about that URL. So, without further adieu, here are the actual “like” counts for both Salt Lake City and Fresno:

Salt Lake City (click the link to see the Graph API response): 136,820 total likes (unique people)

Fresno (click the link to see the Graph API response): 89,578 total likes (unique people)

So, it would appear that, no matter how you “like” it, Salt Lake City still won the competition, fair and square. In one of the most amazing feats of unity around such an amazing cause, I’m proud of my city because of this. Salt Lake City gets social media. We get how to rally, and we get how to work with each other to help out the homeless. As a result, Utah’s Food Bank believes it can turn that 1 million dollars into 7 million dollars with the programs it has in place. The 4th place city, Ogden, Utah will also get $100,000 – Utah Food Bank has pledged that the $100,000 from Ogden, along with the $1 million will get shared across the entire state of Utah, multiplied by 7 in helping the poor and needy. Homeless from all over the nation actually flock to Utah because of our Homeless programs. THANK YOU for your help. I know many of you voted, and I’m sincerely appreciative for this.

If you ever need to tally the “real” likes for an Open Graph URL that uses the “like box” Social Plugin, use the technique I mentioned above – simply pass https://graph.facebook.com/http://pathtoyoursite.com to your browser and you’ll get the likes for your site.

Again, THANK YOU!

If you want tips like just like this one, be sure to pre-order my next book, “Facebook Application Development for Dummies”. Any “dummy” can understand cool stuff like this!

Facebook-hosted "Pages" are No Longer Necessary – Here’s Why

Posted on August 5, 2010 by jessestay

Social Media Examiner shared some advice I gave on their Facebook Page recently regarding the warning about Facebook “boxes” being removed from Facebook Pages in the next week. The reminder was met with a lot of concern from subscribers, who had grown attached to the ability to customize the look and feel of their Facebook Pages through the Static FBML app on Facebook and the ability to add custom “boxes” to the Wall of their Page. The other concern is that Facebook will also be switching to the smaller, 520px Tab format, reducing the amount of surface area for a custom tab to add personalization to a Facebook Page. I argue all this concern is moot however – there is something better Page owners can be doing that they aren’t, and that is moving their Pages over to their own websites and managing the interface there instead of on Facebook.com, and I think that’s the direction Facebook wants Page owners to go.

At Facebook’s sold out F8 developer conference this year this focus seemed evident. Facebook launched a series of new “Social Plugins”, and a protocol (called Open Graph Protocol) enabling any website to essentially become a “Facebook Page”. Right off, website owners could simply put a “like button” Social Plugin on their website by copying and pasting an iframe tag from Facebook’s developer site, and immediately, with some added meta tags added to the section of their HTML, they could have all the functionality of a Facebook Page right on their own website.

Facebook had a great demo at the conference, which Jolie O’Dell (from Mashable) pointed me to (see her article about it here), where they basically took all the content from Lady Gaga’s Page and converted it to its own, customized website with its own look and feel that you could easily change themes. Facebook-me.com, which appears to still be there, enabled customized themes to be applied to profiles, perhaps similar to MySpace in a way, but in a way that website owners themselves could host those themes on their own servers. All this could be done through simple Graph API calls and some customization on your own server. See their demo they gave me here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ix0OY6_6y_8

For instance, if you query http://graph.facebook.com/stay/feed in your browser, immediately you’ll be presented with a parseable feed taken straight from my Facebook Page of all the posts put there. Re-format that in any way you like and you have your own customized Facebook Page. No login necessary.

It can be even better though. Rather than letting Facebook host the data, you can handle most of it on your own through Social Plugins. For instance, let’s look at what happens if I want to make StayNAlive.com its own Facebook Page (in fact I’ll do it right here so you can try it out when I’m finished). I simply go to http://developers.facebook.com and click on the big green “Add Facebook to my Site” button, then click on the Social Plugins link. Select the “Like Button” social plugin, and enter http://staynalive.local in the URL box. Click the “Get Code” button, and you’ll be given code that looks like this:

http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fstaynalive.com&layout=standard&show_faces=true&width=450&action=like&colorscheme=light&height=80

Now, if I put that at the top of the website, a like button appears, and my website is now a Facebook Page. Go ahead and click “like” and you’ll see what I mean. Now you’re subscribed to my “Page”, you’ll get all the posts I send to your news feed, and best of all, any links to the “Page” go back to my actual website, and not Facebook.com.

Becoming an Admin

To get all the benefits of turning your website into a Page and having the full flexibility of customization, you’ll need to make a couple updates to the section of your site’s HTML. These meta tags follow a standard called “Open Graph Protocol”, and by following it, Facebook will know how to represent your site inside Facebook. There are different tags that can specify the title of your site, a main image for your site, and more, but the most important tag you need to add to your site’s section is a meta tag that looks like this:

This specific meta tag identifies the user, 683545112 (which happens to be my Facebook ID), as the admin for your website on Facebook. To get your Facebook ID, the best way I use is to go to your profile, click on your profile image, and look at the number after “id=” in the URL. That’s your Facebook ID. You can also specify multiple Facebook IDs in the content attribute of the meta tag by separating them by commas.

Once you specify this, next to your like button that you just installed you’ll see a “Admin Page” link next to the like button that, by clicking on the link, will take you to what looks like a regular Facebook Page on Facebook. It’s from there you can post updates to your fans and have them see it in their news feed. Also, once you’re identified as an admin, any link to the Facebook Page in your own Feed will link back to that admin interface on Facebook.com. (not to the website itself, which is what all other users will see)

For other meta tag identifiers you can use, view the source of this website and look in the section – look for the “og:” meta tags. You can also read more about it in the developer documentation here.

The Feed

By using this method, you get all the benefits of any normal Facebook Page on Facebook.com. You just have to install the proper Facebook Social Plugins to get what you want. For instance, if you want your visitors to see a feed of all items you’ve posted to the feed, install the “Like Box” social plugin, and enter the ID of the Facebook Page you just set up. (to get the ID, go to the “Admin Page” link next to your like button, and it’s the long number in the URL) Look over on the right of this website to see an example of the Like Box feed.

As mentioned above, you can also post items to your feed. Click “Edit Page” on your admin Page, and you can set up an RSS feed to import notes into your feed. I can also post videos, pictures, or anything else, just as I would a normal Facebook Page hosted on Facebook.com.

Importing Your Blog Posts

You’ll notice the “Like Box” on the right that has all the posts from this blog on it. That’s because I’m importing the RSS for this blog and now ever time a new post goes out all the people that have “Liked” StayNAlive.com via the link above will get all the posts I submit via this blog. This can be a great alternative to allowing users to subscribe via RSS.

So there you have it – any need to customize a Facebook.com-hosted Page is now moot. We don’t need them any more. I see no reason for hosting on Facebook itself if you need full customization. In fact, all links your visitors see in Facebook will now point back to your own website and not Facebook.com. When the user likes your website it will now appear in their interests and link back to your website. That can be good for SEO. Search results will link back to your website, and hints will show up for all your visitors’ friends, pointing them back to your website.

This, IMO is the ideal way to set up a Facebook Page now. The Facebook Page hosted on Facebook.com is not the future. Your website is the future, and Facebook has made it completely possible for you to own this experience.

Are there any reasons you can think of not to use this method? What other tips do you have? I’d like to hear them in the comments and I’ll update this post as it makes sense.

Facebook and the New SEO

Posted on April 30, 2010 by jessestay

With the advent of Facebook’s new Open Graph Protocol announced at their developers conference last week, there has been no shortage of criticism as to what’s private, what’s open, and if this makes Facebook even more open and more closed. While I’ve certainly made my opinion known, there is really little that needs to be said from a brand perspective. It’s quite obvious that Facebook is now a force to be reckoned with, and businesses, brand managers, and so-called “social media experts” should start paying attention. Perhaps the group that should be paying most attention though are those that currently pay attention to SEO for their company, or the brands they represent. With Facebook’s entry into the search space last week, Facebook should now be part of every company’s SEO plan.

Just last week, Mark Zuckerberg was quite clear when he said, announcing Facebook’s new Open Graph Protocol, that Facebook was working to make “people index the web”. No longer are the days of complex algorithms, PhDs focusing on the fastest and most relevant search results through code. What better way to provide relevant content and experience for what people are looking for, and often even when they don’t even know they need it, than through their friends’ activity on Social Networks. Search is now all about relevancy.

I find it ironic that before Google, Sergei Brin’s focus at Stanford was actually a relevancy engine surrounding movies your friends watched. His project centered around looking at how your friends rated movies and then provided suggestions based on the movies your friends like. He quickly scrapped that when the idea behind Google came along. Now, as the tides turn, Mark Zuckerberg took that entire focus of friends’ activity and suggestions, and is building the entire web around it, and just now he’s coming back to focus search around it.

What does Open Graph Protocol have to do with all this? Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol is just a series of meta tags that enables Facebook, when specific Social Plugins are installed on a site (or the site is registered through Facebook Insights), to begin tracking that website. Each website can provide very specific information about itself, and how it relates to the Facebook (or other) networks. If you view the source of this blog you’ll notice I even get so specific as to identifying what my phone number is and what e-mail address you can contact me with. All this information gets registered with Facebook.

Now, when you search in Facebook for “Stay”, this blog should show up in those search results, taking you right back to this blog, and providing you relevant results based on the usage and likes of yourself and your friends, something much more powerful than just an anonymous link network. Each and every website on the internet has this opportunity to now appear in the Facebook search results, and with little effort, intercept itself between the friends of its viewers so they can easily share it with others. That’s a very powerful concept, and so far in just the last week, over 50,000 websites are already taking advantage of this!

SEO is something that is now a standard part of any businesses web budget. It’s simple – you build common strategies for formulating your content to appear properly in Google and others’ search results. You try to guess the keywords you want your website to appear high under, and adapt the content of your site to make finding it in search engine results much easier. Now, you’re going to need to do the same with Facebook. Each SEO manager within a company should seriously be considering adding the proper Open Graph Protocol meta tags in their site, and, by doing so, they will now appear in Facebook’s search results as well.

Facebook has made it clear that this is a search game. The release of Open Graph Protocol makes this clearer, and you should be paying attention. Through your likes, Facebook now has the potential to provide near exact matches of advertising towards exactly what you’re looking for, without you even knowing you needed it. That, my friends, is the holy grail of advertising.

Now, take those ads and spread them across the web, just like adwords/adsense. Give website owners a cut for sharing them on their site. You now have near perfect contextual advertising across every website on the web, Facebook becomes even bigger as they make more money from those ads, and the web becomes a better place by providing an experience you, the user, actually want to receive. The brands advertising make more money, as does Facebook, because ads aren’t being wasted on people that do not want to receive them.

Facebook just did something huge last week. It is now in the interest of every single company out there to be getting their brand visible in the Facebook search so this can happen. This is a search game more than it is social. Facebook just made it a whole heck of a lot more valuable for you to be investing in SEO, but this time it’s on Facebook’s terms, not Google’s, and in the end everyone wins. Well, except maybe Google. If Facebook isn’t currently a part of your company’s SEO strategy it’s time to start re-thinking what SEO means to you and your company. Like it or not, Facebook is the new SEO.

Facebook Launches OpenGraphProtocol.org: Adds Second Product to the OWFa

Posted on April 22, 2010 by jessestay

Just two years ago at OSCON, Facebook, Google, Myspace, and others all joined forces to create the Open Web Foundation, a sort of GPL-like agreement for platform builders to have a common agreement users could understand. Facebook announced their first support of the OWF agreement in November of 2009 with the launch of the OAuth WRAP protocol, an experimental protocol intended to lead to a more open authentication and authorization platform for Facebook. Today, with the launch of a new, non-Facebook centric protocol page for OpenGraphProtocol.org, Facebook announced their second entry under the Open Web Foundation Agreement. According to Tantek Celik, and confirmed by Facebook’s David Recordon on the OWF mailing list, ‘Facebook’s “The Open Graph Protocol” is the most recent user/adopter of the OWFa’.

What does this mean? Basically, it means that the new Open Graph Protocol announced by Facebook yesterday is under a completely open license agreement that other platform creators can adopt, use, and freely distribute without worry of patent. As I said, in many ways it is similar to the GPL, in that platforms created under this agreement are intended to be re-used and distributed across the web, keeping the license in tact.

The Open Graph Protocol defines specific meta tags which sites can integrate to identify themselves as a “Page” on Facebook’s social graph. Doing so, and identifying it with Facebook, enables that Page to receive likes, activity updates, and more via Facebook users and “Social Widgets” they can incorporate from Facebook on the site. I’m still unclear how this benefits anyone but Facebook.

While Facebook’s internal APIs still appear to remain proprietary, it’s good to see Facebook starting to open up. The good thing about this protocol is anyone can mimick it or duplicate its functionality for their own purposes. This is something, other than OAuth WRAP, which Facebook just hasn’t had up until this point. Let’s hope this trend continues.