Getting number of people who like a page on facebook by city

Question

A question than has been floating around is how to get the list of IDs of people that like a page (here, or here, for instance). From previous answers (and reading the FB API docs...) I am convinced that to be impossible.

However, that is not what I'm after. I don't need the user_ids at all. I just need the number of likes of a page, per city (or some subdivision of a country). There is a field for a Page for the total number of likes, which obviously isn't enough. Insights should provide this, but while page_fans_country works ok as the info is public, page_fans_city returns no results, so I'd need a different way of getting the information.

Is there a query (or set of queries) that would work? Either Graph API or FQL would be fine, at this point.

Answer 1

As to your first statement, I have found that to be correct aswell. My current solution includes, as it has to, external storage.

On to your actual question, it is possible via the Insights API you've found yourself. Rather than moving on from page_fans_city (because it returns no results), you should find the issue. Most likely, you're using a User Access Token without the scope manage_pages, which prevents it from becoming a Page Access token. You should also include read_insights. Read more here. For further information about the object/insights go here.

Hope this helped.