Show HN: EdgeKick, real-time analytics for public Facebook pages | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: EdgeKick, real-time analytics for public Facebook pages

edgekick.com

58 pointsakane35 comments

Quick bugfix: It only seems to work if you include the "www." in the URL of the page. Why not just ask for the page-slug instead of the full URL?

EDIT: I can see this being really useful in a "opposition research" sort of way. It would be great to be able to view/compare multiple pages at the same time, and then try to highlight where one is going better than the other.

For pages that you manage, it's really not that useful when compared to the powerful analytics Facebook already provides through the insights tool.

I thought the full URL was easiest since you can copy and paste. For pages that are already being watched, the slug will take you to the page. However, some fb pages don't have vanity urls.

Edit: thanks for the feedback. Adding the ability to compare your page to competitors would be pretty nice.

That's a fair call, though it's pretty easy to check if "facebook" is in the submitted string and then check if it's a page slug if it's not.

Seems pretty cool, but the main graph at the top doesn't seem like a very helpful way to visualize data. It seems safe to assume that the vast majority of Facebook pages gain likes over time, and the graph has lower and upper bounds that are very close to those of the data which means you'll pretty much always have the same graph on every page. It doesn't really tell me anything.

For example, I just clicked on the first six reports you link to on your landing page, and the graph looks the same for all of them.

Other than that, this looks pretty handy. Thanks.

I see what you mean. Something like % fans talking about the page would be more useful.

Facebook sometimes shows the cached public page, so the data you are grabbing may jump around.

Example: http://www.dodaj.rs/f/2X/72/1YrHKUTF/edgekick.png

Maybe you can add some smoothing in the graph being shown. According to FB insights this page got 5 likes in the morning, and there are no unlikes. If you visit public page, it will show +/- 5, but when logged in to the FB insights dashboard it is consistent at the top value.

What exactly are you offering here -- a scraping and archival service? I'm presuming you're claiming "real-time" because Facebook page insights are already real-time [1], and you periodically scrape and archive that data [2]?

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/26/facebook-insights-real-time... [2] http://graph.facebook.com/waltdisneyworld

FB reports analytics in realtime, but not all social analytics companies fetch them multiple times an hour. It's impossible to get insights for a page without the owner's access token, so this just uses public data. Also, FB doesn't show how long posts are active, which I find most interesting.

I can't see the analytics of my fan page. The error I'm getting is: "We cannot find a Facebook page with this link.".

What's the URL?

https://www.facebook.com/JB.HiFi.Official is not working for me.

My bad. I'll fix the regexp next time I'm at a computer and let you know.

Fixed. Hope you find the site helpful. http://www.edgekick.com/fb/jbhifiofficial

updated every 10 minutes != Real-time

Awesome work, but i guess you are tracking only few top pages. Cannot find back in time analytics even for pages with a couple of million likes.

Probably too many and no easy way of finding them all to scan them all

yes, i can imagine how difficult it is to fetch millions of pages given the strict rate limits

You're both correct. I just added 150 pages that I found interesting to get started.

This is pretty good. What's the game plan with it?

We've used a whole heap of tools to try to track brand pages and it's always a pain the arse. No one has a clean interface like this and guys like SocialBakers charge like a wounded bull.

Glad you like the interface. I tried to keep it simple.

Thanks, I'd like to add a deeper analysis of post content and determine the tipping point for posts that go viral.

so what exactly does it do after i enter a URL? is it continuously scraping and gathering data to populate the graph? if that's the case, thanks cause this is a good tool to spy on my competition :)

Exactly. In addition to seeing how long your posts are active and which post types perform the best, you can learn a lot about your competition (or any other public page you're interested in)

not working, i keep getting "We cannot find a Facebook page with this link."

if i add an "s" to http, i get "Sorry, we are over capicity. Please try again later."

Any ideas? slug is estrela10

I'll look into it after work today and let you know.

Is this page public? http://graph.facebook.com/estrela10 returns false.

It would be cool if this could overlay charts from different brands.

Thanks for the feedback.

Great work, but how is this real-time?

Since FB doesn't provide a push API for analytics, the best we can do is poll. I felt that 10 minutes gives an accurate picture of the like/comment/share trajectory for posts.

love @ first sight :)

btw how did you generate those nice charts?

Awesome, the charts are Google Charts.

I'm curious as well...and while I'm at it do you store the analytics in a db?

Nothing special about the db - just PostgreSQL on Heroku

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