New Facebook APIs Will Provide More Detailed Data to Brands

Facebook recently revealed two new APIs (application programming interfaces) that will provide better insights to brands using real-time data. With the public feed API and the keyword insight API, not only can companies see how often certain words are mentioned, but they can also view detailed demographic data. While the use of these APIs is currently limited, they have enormous potential for all brands working on their customer engagement and marketing on Facebook. In addition, these APIs bring Facebook into major competition with Twitter due to their enhanced demographic capabilities.

The New APIs

The two new APIs that Facebook introduced are called the public feed API and the keyword insight API. With the public feed API, you are provided with a feed in real-time that shows all of the public posts that are being made with a specific word. This feed will only show public posts that are made from either pages or important users who have enabled the “follow” feature on Facebook. With the keyword insights API, you can see how many posts were made with a specific term during a designated time frame. While this API will use private posts and show demographic data about age, location, and gender, this data will be completely anonymous.

How It Helps Brands

While both of these APIs are currently only available to select media partners of Facebook, which include CNN, BuzzFeed, Slate, NBC’s “Today,” Mass Relevance, and Sky Broadcasting, Facebook is planning to open up these tools to both Preferred Marketing Developers and other specific media organizations soon. If they do become available to all brands on Facebook, these APIs can bring huge benefits to marketers. You will be able to not only view the rate of usage for different terms, but also sort that data by time frame (such as before, during, and after an event) and by demographic data. Furthermore, this data will be in real-time, allowing you to respond to customer issues, trends, and breaking news faster and much more constructively.

Competing With Twitter

Many have noted that these new APIs from Facebook closely resemble the capabilities that brands have to search terms on Twitter. However, on Facebook, this data has a significant advantage: demographic data. Facebook has much more detailed personal information than probably any other site or social media network on the web, including where you live, your work and education history, your relationship and family, and more. This type of data is extremely valuable to both news outlets and brands. Overall, this kind of data makes marketing and analyzing your performance on Facebook even more important to your brand’s success.

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Firefox tries to get Facebook friendly with new Social API

Firefox's social API will soon launch for beta testing and offer users instant, in-browser social network access.

We’ve all seen search engines have been integrating plenty of social features, but browsers are also jumping on that bandwagon. Firefox announced today it will be integrating social features into its own browser and revealed preliminary support for a new social API that will allow developers to add social services right into its product.

Firefox has dabbled in social networking for some time now. Its social API stems from Firefox’s early and rudimentary feature called “Share,” which was released early in 2012. It made sharing URLs to your social network a breeze from within its browser. And back in March 2012, Firefox talked about how they were experimenting with social network, discussing early ideas for their social API:

• Configure which social service provider(s) you want to integrate with your browser
• Easily switch which service provider(s) should be active at any time
• See which of your contacts are online and available for a chat (and start or join chats)
• Share and read updates
• Recommend, or express support, for things that you discover on the Web
• Manage and receive notifications about activities coming from the service (friend requests, chat requests, etc.)

To sum it all up, the new addition means you won’t have to open up a new window and keep it open to check out the latest updates from your social networks. Hypothetically, apps like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ can be accessed simply from the Firefox browser. “You can stay connected to your favorite social networks even while you are surfing the Web, watching a video, or playing a game,” says Firefox. But not only your social media accounts will be able to be integrated into your Firefox browser. It could easily expand to Gmail integration or the latest stock tickers. “The Social API will ultimately support multiple providers and has endless potential for integrating social networks, e-mail, finance, news and other applications into your Firefox experience.” The first service to integrate with the Social API is Facebook Messenger, so Firefox users will be able to get their Facebook chat fix without visiting the site. 

We noticed that the developer guide for the API has yet to be edited. In fact you’ll find a tag that denotes where a diagram would go, which currently just says: “<<<add an actual diagram>>>.” So when the beta version of the API is finally launched, some of the guidelines for developers are likely subject to change. In the meantime, it gives us a cursory look at how the integration will work. When the browser is opened and a connection to the Internet is established, you’ll immediately receive push notifications to the browser for the appropriate in-browser apps. If a chatting option is available, selecting chat will open up the service in new window.

It will be interesting to see how Facebook and Twitter especially play nice with a browser API, since that means fewer eyeballs on their proprietary sites. 

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