Ever see an awesome piece of online marketing or cool app inside Facebook? Ever think “gee, I wonder which agency did that?”

Finding out is, in some cases, incredibly simple. All you have to do is find out where it lives - trivial for a web developer, but not so obvious to those who don’t read code.

Any application on Facebook is actually a tiny website, usually of just a few pages, with some added social features. So what you’re seeing on Facebook when a brand has a really nifty app isn’t actually being stored on facebook.com at all, but on an external website from which it’s pulled in. Think of it like embedding a YouTube video on a blog; the video is always stored on YouTube, it’s just displayed inside another site.

So how does this help us?

Well, that Facebook page is stored somewhere, and there’s good odds it’s stored on the server of whoever built it. It’s often easier to let the digital agency host the application than passing it off to the client.

Take, for example, the rather good campaign from Heinz Ireland, “It Has to be Heinz.”

Heinz’s Tasty Awards is a dead simple campaign based off the tried-and-true judge’s decision competition, but it’s well-executed (enough to have the page nominated for a Social Media Effectiveness #sockie). So who’s doing such good work?

Easy - we use our browser’s built-in tools to find out.

Firefox is best for this: all you have to do is right-click on the middle of the page, away from anything else, and choose “View Background Image.” This will load up our background on its own, and right up top we’ll have our address where the image is kept on the web…

Ah! It’s the good people at Ogilvy Ireland.

Simple!

If you’re on Chrome, or the background image isn’t loadable for some reason, you can try opening your browser’s web developer tools and taking a look at the code. Again, your best bet is to find the background image using the inspector tool, right-click it once found and open it in a new window.

Of course, if you end up with a brand domain name (like Red Bull’s redbullfb.com) you’re out of luck.

What if they don’t have an explanatory URL?

Many agencies pick a generic URL for clients so that the agency can’t be found. For example, a quick browse on Vodafone Ireland’s Facebook page shows us that they use the domain clienthost365.com. Hmmm. Not really helpful!

A simple WHOIS search helps us out here. This search tells us who the domain name is registered under, and, in this case, it’s Razor, a creative communications agency from Belgrade in Serbia.

Now, this kind of result would usually throw me, but in the case of a huge multinational like Vodafone, a Serbian company is not unexpected.

If you have a generic URL registered to a private individual, a solicitor, or other proxy, you’re out of luck, I’m afraid.

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