Feed

The Feed stories represents the users Newsfeed and Timeline. Stories posted via the Feed Dialog will appear in the users friends' Newsfeed and ultimately post to their Tieline, so long as they are both engaged with the game. These unstructured stories will not appear in Ticker. Feed Stories can be either one to many - the user is posting to their own Timeline or one to one - the user is posting to a friends Timeline.

Feed Stories contain unstructured data, essentially strings, that are customized by the developer. One notable feature of Feed Stories that differentiates it from the other Social Channels is the ability for a user to enter a custom message. This results in a more personal story and can lead to higher engagement from the user's friends.

This document will walk through

• User experience
• Common Scenarios
• Best practices

User Experience

Posting to the current users Timeline:

Posting to a friends Timeline:

Common Scenarios

Next we'll discuss a core scenario for feed stories - Bragging.

Bragging Stories

A common use-case for Feed are “Brag” stories. These are intentional posts made on the users behalf when they have completed an activity of note within the game; anything from completing a quest, earning a new level or defeating a player. Bragging is a great use case that tends to drive a high level of engagement due to the competitive nature of games.

Pro-Tip: As mentioned previously, one of the key features that differentiate Feed is the ability for a user to add a message to the Story. This results in a more personal story and can lead to higher engagement from the user's friends. Try to limit using Feed stories to interesting and note worthy moments within your game; these should be intentional shares that the user is invested in making it more likely for them to include a personal message.

For more detailed information, check out the Feed Dialog docs.

Best Practices

This doc walks through the some best practices to get the most value from your feed stories.

Pro-Tip 1: Use the Feed Dialog for low-frequency, highly interesting actions

Use the Feed dialog when a user would naturally want to brag or share. Because the Feed Dialog interrupts game play, it shouldn’t be used for frequent actions.

Pro-Tip 2: Encourage user to add a personalized message

One of the key features that differentiate Feed is the ability for a user to add a message to the Story. This results in a more personal story and can lead to higher engagement from the user's friends. Try to limit using Feed stories to interesting and note worthy moments within your game; these should be intentional shares that the user is invested in making it more likely for them to include a personal message.

For more detailed information, check out the Feed Dialog docs.

Pro-Tip 3: Image Size

To take best advantage of the Facebook News Feed, we encourage you to optimize for high-resolution Feed stories on both web and mobile by providing 600X600 pixel images (minimum 200X200 px).

Pro-Tip 4: Feed gaming

More and more games are leveraging in-feed gaming to create engaging stories for users. This involves publishing a story on behalf of a user which has a flash object attached. When a user's friends see these attachments, they will be able to click to play them inline. This opens up some interesting scenarios for a small embeddable version of your game to be shown to a user's friends, at the end of which you can encourage them to click through to your canvas app.

Example use cases:

• Post a high score on a particular level and challenge friends to beat it.
• Enable a replay of interesting user activity so friends can see how to complete a level for example.
• Create a mini-game that users can play in-line to get them excited to play the game.

Example posts from real games:

• Angry Birds lets users challenge friends to beat your score on a level. Try now.
• Bubble Witch Saga enables sharing coins with friends, they can earn a multiplier for a high score.Try now
• Idle Worship lets users share a mini-game which gives friends a glimpse of the full game.Try now.
• Tetris Battle allows publishing a replay of a two-player battle. Try now.

For more detailed information, check out the Feed Gaming how to.

Pro-Tip 5: Use Action links in feed

When posting feed stories on behalf of users, you should provide action links to encourage users to engage with the feed story. These can be call to actions to get some reward, to help a friend, to play a level etc. whatever makes most sense for your feed story.

These action links show up below the feed story as call to actions next to the default ones like like and comment.

Example posts from real games:

You can post action links to your feed dialogs by specifying the actions parameters with a JSON array containing a objects which specify the name and link for each action.

function postToFeed() {
  // call the API
  var obj = {
    method: 'feed',
    link: 'http://example.com',
    picture: 'http://example.com/dialog_image.png',
    name: 'Testing Action links',
    caption: 'Test app',
    actions: [
      {'name': 'get reward', 'link': 'http://example.com/redeem_reward'}
    ],
    description: 'Action links are awesome.'
  };

  function callback(response) {
    console.log(response);
  }

  FB.ui(obj, callback);
}

Pro-Tip 6: Track engagement and optimize your feed stories

When publishing on behalf of a user, you can specify a value for the ref parameter which is used to define a category in Facebook Insights which enables you to measure the performance of different types of posts. When viewing Insights for your app, navigate to Traffic > Stream Publish, and you will see a Story Type drop down menu at the top of the page, allowing you to filter the data for stories published, impressions and clicks by each category. This makes it easy to test different copy, images and integration points to see which performs best.

This value will also be passed back to you in the fb_ref parameter which will be appended onto the end of the url when users click on your story title and are taken directly to the game - i.e. without playing the embedded content.

Get Started

You can publish a feed story on behalf of your user by either using the Feed Dialog or by publishing via the Graph API as long as you have the publish_actions permission.

• To publish using the Dialog please refer to Feed dialog docs.
• To publish using the API refer to User and Post object docs.

To learn about other ways to drive distribution for your Game please refer to the Games distribution doc.