Facebook has been on a quest – to make the Graph API the best it can be. In that tireless pursuit, the social network has added a number of new features and functionality to the API to help developers get the most out of Facebook. The latest update to the API isn’t groundbreaking, but it will be useful nonetheless.
The latest update coming to the Graph API are two new page metrics for benchmarking. The feature was announced in October as part of Facebook’s rollout of global brand pages. At the time, Facebook had this to say about it:
In addition to providing better localized experiences for your customers, we want to make it easier for you to measure your audience in each country as well as benchmark your brand against other brands you care about. Later this year we will include the country-level fan counts for all Pages (both those using the Global Pages framework as well as Pages that haven’t transitioned to the new framework) publicly in our API. This will enable your internal teams to track how each market is performing, as well as to compare your fan base on a country-by-country level with other Pages on Facebook by accessing the data available via our API.
Now the feature is available in the API, and Facebook has some more information on the feature. For once, the metrics included in this first iteration are like count and PTAT (people talking about this). Facebook will take this information and allow brands to compare it to other brands to see which products are being talked about more on Facebook. To access this new information, just hit up the new ‘global_brand_like_count’ and ‘global_brand_talking_about_count’ fields on the Insights object.
As for the weekly bug report, 288 were reported and 37 were fixed. Facebook has also accepted 72 bugs for further review. You can check out the full list by hitting up the blog post.