how to get the like count for a specific region on a facebook page

I ran in to a problem while doing some research on Facebook brand pages… some brands have regional pages but only the global like count is on display, making it impossible to figure out the regional like count. For example, Pepsi have 31m likes but if you want to find out have many of that 31m come from Argentina, that’s a bit of a problem… after much digging, i stumbled upon a solution which i’ll share…

Demo of the problem

A couple of years ago, Facebook launched ‘Global Pages’ for brands which allows them to maintain one global identity and promote one global url whilst still offering a personalised, local experience for a brands customers.

Pepsi are a good example… if you’re Pepsi, you’ll have a presence in pretty much every country on the planet. It therefore makes sense to keep a dedicated marketing team in each country, which allows for better targeting. In Ireland & the UK, you might have content in English, perhaps adding some British humour in to content – joking about the weather… in Argentina, you might have content in Spanish and jokes about the unpredictable weather won’t be as effective…

As you can see in the screenshots above, even when we change the region to Argentina, the like count remains at 31m… this is perhaps slightly misleading and something you need to be aware of if you’re crunching the numbers for big brands in specific regions.

The Solution

Unfortunately, there’s no easy solution but i was pretty determined to find a way of doing this and this is what i came up with…

• Sign up as a facebook developer. It’s free and doesn’t take long. And no, you don’t actually need to be a developer to sign up.
• Go to the Graph API Explorer – https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer/
• Click on the ‘Get Access Token’ button (lightbox will appear)
• Go to the ‘extended permissions’ tab and tick the ‘read_insights’ checkbox
• Generate the access token 
• Copy it and paste it on to the end of this url:
  https://graph.facebook.com/pepsi/insights/page_fans_country?access_token=

Here’s one I baked earlier… you should end up with something like this, listing 2 character country codes and corresponding like numbers…

Just to recap, the ‘formula’ is as follows:

https://graph.facebook.com/[BrandName]/insights/page_fans_country?access_token=[AccessToken]

You simply replace the bolded bits with the brand page name and your own access code. The access code will also expire regularly so if you get an error message, try generating a one.