Updating Twitter from a Facebook RSS feed

Last November Eureka Burger opened a new store in San Luis Obispo and I wanted to keep up to date on events, so I searched for them on Twitter. No luck. They didn’t have a Twitter account, but they did have a Facebook page.

@EurekaBurgerSLO

Since I knew I could publish to Twitter from the excellent ifttt using an RSS feed I setup an Unofficial Eureka Burger SLO Twitter account, @EurekaBurgerSLO. A few clicks to create a Recipe on ifttt and the account was up and running.

Enter Facebook Timelines

When Facebook switched on the new Timeline feature the RSS feed for Eureka Burger SLO stopped working and the @EurekaBurgerSLO account stopped updating. Since I didn’t have a Facebook account I asked my wife to go through the process of finding an RSS feed for a Facebook Timeline. We couldn’t find one, so I gave up on the account and approached a Manager at Eureka Burger SLO about taking over the account. He agreed and I turned over the account to Eureka Burger. I was absolutely trilled. I no longer had to maintain the account and all the problems that might come along for the ride.

Why isn’t it updating?

After a while I noticed the @EurekaBurgerSLO account stopped updating. Why? Well it looks like they had one person updating the feed, instead of hooking it to their Facebook account to automagically publish to Twitter. As of this writing the last update was June 8, 2012. That really bummed me out.

Introducing @SLOEurekaBurger

That’s right, I’ve created a new account so I can automagically update it and see what beer is featured on “Steal the glass night.”

This time around I did a bit of digging, ok, I did a single Google query that lead me to this entry of Stack Overflow. It allowed me to dig out the Facebook RSS feed for Eureka Burger SLO with a couple URL’s.

How To Find a Facebook Wall RSS Feed

We’re going to use the Eureka Burger SLO Facebook account as an example, since it’s what I used.

Step 1: Right click the GIGANTOR image, known as a Cover, and copy the URL.

In this case the URL is:

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=335049253213178&set=a.335049249879845.89916.234741763243928&type=1

All we need is the fbid parameter, in bold above.

Step 2: Check the Facebook Graph for that fbid

http://graph.facebook.com/335049253213178

The graph call will produce a JSON feed that looks like this:

Notice the highlighted number id. We need to copy that number for the next step in the process.

Step 3: Get the RSS Feed

https://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?id=234741763243928&format=rss20

Once again, notice the bold text above. That’s the id we copied from step two. Now you have an RSS feed for a Facebook Wall. Very nice.

Step 4: Create an ifttt Recipe

Since I needed a way to publish that RSS feed to the new @SLOEurekaBurger Twitter account I chose to use ifttt. I’ll let you go explore that. Ifttt is an awesome service if you need to transform data from one format to another, or from a format to a social media stream, like going from a Facebook RSS feed to Twitter.

Hopefully someone will find this useful. I know I did. Let’s hope it works.