Gathering aggregate data on performance of facebook posts on non-owned pages

Question

for some research I'm doing, I want to be able to count the number of comments and likes per post on a facebook page (trying to figure out what type of content leads to the most engagement for environmental charities). I don't know much about API's but I know some basic python and I'm pretty advanced in R--but I dont know if any of this would be useful.

I'm guessing it will have something to do with defining a post on a page as a structure and then just counting up to n posts for number comments and likes, but I have absolutely no idea how to do this...

More information:

• I am not the owner/operator of these pages.

• Any ideas on how to get more data on the likers/commenters would be
  very useful.

• In the end I would this data to end up as a csv or excel file.

Thank you very much!

Answer 1

Simply put, there are some obstacles:

• The Graph API and FQL queries do not return aggregated results except the Page insights, but they are only accessible to Page administrators
• You can access public Page posts (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/page/feed/), but you have to count the results yourself
• Getting more data on the likers/commenters is only possible if you have an app with the appropriate permissions gathered to read the User Graph data
• And for figuring out "what type of content leads to the most engagement", you'd need to have some kind of text mining/natural language processing software in place