Checking for new posts on Facebook

Question

Is it possible to check for new posts on Facebook page (Fan Page or Personal Page)? I need to recognize new posts on page every X minutes. What are my options? Are there ways to do it without Facebook Api? And is it possible to do this with Api? Thank you

Answer 1

This is possible with the Realtime API: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/real-time-updates/v2.1

You can connect it to a Page or a User Profile. It´s much better than checking on your own with a Cron Job (for example), because Facebook will hit your callback URL on every change so you will never hit a rate limit. I´ve experienced that it is quite fast, new entries are recognized at least 30 seconds after they where changed/created, sometimes even faster.

Btw, it is not allowed without the API, that would be scraping and Facebook does not allow scraping: https://www.facebook.com/apps/site_scraping_tos_terms.php