What Is My Facebook Business Page’s RSS Feed?
While it’s relatively easy to bring data INTO Facebook using RSS applications (RSS Graffiti being my favorite)… Facebook isn’t particularly a fan of data LEAVING!
So, we’re going to do a little Facebook wizardry!
However, sometimes, we have darn good reasons to want to ascertain some control over this data… particular in the form of making a backup or re-purposing the content.
Recently a colleague inquired:
“Where can I find the RSS feed for a Facebook page? I tried adding a Facebook page to Google Reader but it can’t find a feed URL. I’ve searched Google, but all the information I found is no longer relevant and doesn’t work.”
The answer is that Facebook keeps making this task more and more challenging!
(You noticed that, I see!)
Originally, in the left hand sidebar of the Facebook page, we had a handy little RSS icon that made this relatively simple!
Now, as Facebook has come to push users to engage through the applications API interface, the expectation is that all of the access to our feeds that we need… can be accomplished via those tools.
An example of a Facebook application that DOES monitor page contents would be Hootsuite’s app…. which, while excellent, isn’t what we need!
What we need, sometimes, is an oldschool RSS (or RSS 2.0 or ATOM feed).
I, for example, use my Facebook fan page’s RSS feed to pull data into two different sites for different purposes (one is strictly backup and the other is content repurposing).
This may look intimidating, but is is still something you as a business owner can likely accomplish on your own…
Let me show you how to get that pesky FB Page RSS feed URL!
1. First, we need to get our FB Page ID Number.
We do this by replacing the www in our page URL with the word “graph” so that https://www.facebook.com/Ask.Kim becomes https://graph.facebook.com/Ask.Kim (and hit enter).
On the resulting page, fine the “id” and jot it down. We will use it without the quotes around it.
In this example, our ID is: 187709648701
This number may look familiar as it was the really long number that was in or original page URL before you set your Facebook page’s vanity url.
Got it? Good…
2. Now, we need to do a minor reverse engineering of this URL to get YOUR URL:
https://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?id=187709648701&format=rss20
That URL has MY ID in it… and you need to replace it with the ID you retrieved in step one.
Once you have put your ID in… you have successfully created the RSS 2.0 Feed URL for your Facebook Page (effective: 9/26/12)
And there you have it!
An RSS Feed that is useful any place ANY RSS Feed can be used!
See, that wasn’t so tough was it? Nice wizardry!
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