Get historical Facebook level post metrics

Question

There are a set of metrics available in Facebook Insights post-level data, with scope lifetime. For example:

• Total Reach - The number of people who saw your Page post (unique users). Organic Reach - The number of people who saw your Page post in News Feed or Ticker, or on your Page’s Wall (unique users).
• Paid Reach - The number of people who saw your Page post in an Ad or Sponsored Story (unique users).
• Viral Reach - The number of people who saw your Page post in a story from a friend (unique users).
• Total Impressions - The number of impressions of your Page post (total count). Organic Impressions - The number of impressions of your post in News Feed or Ticker or on your Page’s Wall (total count).

Does anyone know how to get this these metrics a specífic day or a range of time, via API?

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Post Insights are collected and reported in real-time (or near-real time), and are not aggregated by day, week, or 28 day period. In other words, you won't be able to get historic data but you could run a scheduled job to capture all of your posts and the metrics you're after each day.

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/v2.2/insights

In my experience, running the job in shorter intervals (10 minutes, 1 hour, etc) and seeing how post metrics evolve by time of day and day of week is a valuable exercise.

You can make 600 calls every 600 seconds - might as well make the most of them.