Salesforce is all about Customer Relationship management and social media networking sites like Facebook are the perfect medium for interacting with your customers. Integrate the two and you get a powerful system which breaks the boundaries of online interaction and mass networking, all through a user’s Salesforce account!
An Integration between Facebook and Salesforce makes it easy for companies to connect with their customers and post regular updates from within the Salesforce Service Cloud.
Given below are some simple steps to help you integrate Facebook API with Salesforce:
- Create the Facebook application after which, the settings will be automatically updated with the application id, application secret and connect URL
- For the connect URL, a force.com site has to be created and the URL has to be updated in the Facebook app
- A remote site setting within Salesforce has to be created in order for it to connect Facebook
- The application has to be authorized (via OAuth 2.0) by running the visual force page
- On the visual force page controller the Facebook Graph API has to be polled/called with client ID, client secret
- The access token (valid for an average of 120 minutes) can be used to connect with Facebook.
- The user can post on Facebook by calling/polling the different endpoint URLs
- This manual process then has to be automated using schedule apex and a custom logic has to be written to automate and schedule the server polling/calling every 5 minutes or every 1 hour, based on existing limitations in Salesforce
- The schedule apex custom logic has to parse (JSON parsing) at scheduled intervals for posts, likes and comments
When the integration is successfully completed and executed, any feed posted on Facebook will have a corresponding record in Salesforce.
The integration will allow the user to implement and manage the following activities/feeds through Salesforce:
- User
- Likes
- Friends
- Profile Pic
- Photos
- Home
- Feed
- Groups
- Movies
- Notes
- Events
- Books
- Albums
The integration thus provides Salesforce users a simple means to manage their Facebook posts and interact with customers from within Salesforce.
