How to Update Facebook Status on user's behalf

In the previous blog entry, "how to tweet on user's behalf", we talked about how to tweet on user's behalf through Twitter application. In this blog, we will discuss similar function on Facebook, i.e., how to update status on user's behalf. And necessary steps are very similar,

1. Create a Facebook campaign specific application
2. Obtain an access token for a particular Facebook account. This process does require user to log into his/her Facebook account and explicitly grant permission to the Facebook app, which will post on user's behalf. Once the access token is retrieved, we can post on the user's behalf through the app. Unlike Twitter, the access token currently does expire in 60 days, upon which we must go through the same process of obtaining a new access token. Not very user friendly in our opinion.

Setting up a Facebook Application

Step1. Go to https://developers.facebook.com/

Step2. Fill in necessary information,

App ID/App Key and App Secret will be used in obtaining access token.

Obtaining Access Token

Obtain an access token for a particular Facebook account. This process does require user to log into his/her Facebook account and explicitly grant permission to the Facebook app, which will post on user's behalf. Once the access token is retrieved, we can post on the user's behalf through the app. Unlike Twitter, the access token currently does expire in 60 days, upon which we must go through the same process of obtaining a new access token. Not very user friendly in our opinion.

Here is the high level flow for obtaining a Facebook access token,

Here is the detailed sequence diagrams on obtaining access token,

Once an access token is granted, we can start updating user's status as the following,

HTTP POST "https://graph.facebook.com/" + facebookUser + "/feed?access_token=" + token + "&message=" + URLEncoder.encode(message, "utf-8");