Get Social Share Counts – A Complete Guide

Number of social shares are tracked by various people for different purposes. It includes Social Media Analytics, Social sharing plugins or Custom social sharing buttons. A great importance is given by websites for social sharing and displaying the sharing trend. This adds credibility and traffic for a website.

All social sites provide their own social sharing buttons which can be placed directly to our website code. But in most of the cases, it is misaligned and cannot be customized beyond a limit.

Popular sites like Mashable, The Next Web implement social share values in a better design.

Get Number of URL Shares on Facebook

In Facebook, a url is shared when user explicitly publishes a url as status or when user likes the url. The general api url is:

1	http://graph.facebook.com/?id=[YOUR URL]

To obtain number facebook shares for google home page, here is how the request goes:

1	http://graph.facebook.com/?id=http://www.google.com

The response is in json format.

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{    "id": "http://www.google.com",    "shares": 5460803,    "comments": 2 }

One can also find the total share count using FQL(Facebook Query Language). Here is the syntax:

1	https://graph.facebook.com/fql?q=SELECT url, total_count FROM link_stat WHERE url='[YOUR URL]'

Note the quotes before and after the url. Here if we try the link for google.com, we will get the following result.

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{    "data": [       {          "url": "http://google.com",          "total_count": 5460803       }    ] }

Number of Facebook Likes for a Page

A Facebook page will have a name or id. The facebook page link of cube3x is http://facebook.com/cube3x. Here the page name is cube3x. For some facebook page the link will be long say, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Deiva-Thirumagan/224305057596097. Here the unique id for the page is the last number 224305057596097. We need either the name or id to get the number of likes from facebook.

Cube3x Note: Like our facebook page to motivate us and to receive live updates.

Here is the url syntax to receive number of facebook likes for a page.

1	https://graph.facebook.com/[facebook page name / id]

Let us find the number of likes for our official facebook page.

1	https://graph.facebook.com/cube3x

Currently our official facebook page has 7 likes. The graph url returns all public data of the page in json format.

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{    "about": "A startup supporting free open source themes for wordpress. Its just a start. long way to go",    "is_published": true,    "talking_about_count": 0,    "username": "cube3x",    "website": "www.cube3x.com",    "were_here_count": 0,    "category": "Community",    "id": "402519899836822",    "name": "CUBE3X",    "link": "http://www.facebook.com/cube3x",    "likes": 7,    "cover": {       "cover_id": 403027916452687,       "source": "http://sphotos-g.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/s720x720/282970_403027916452687_638634905_n.png",       "offset_y": 0    } }

Number of Twitter Shares

When somebody posts a link on their twitter page, the share count of that link increases. Finding the url share count in twitter denotes how popular and viral the url is amoung twitter users.

Here is the url syntax to get number of twitter shares for a particular url:

1	http://cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=[YOUR-URL]

Twitter is very particular about the url value used. For example, http://yoursite.com and http://www.yoursite.com may return different result.

When I am writing this post, I know there the share count of http://cube3x.com/all-in-one-social/ is 2 in twitter. Let us find out using the api link.

1	http://cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://cube3x.com/all-in-one-social/

The json object appears like this:

1	{"count":2,"url":"http:\/\/cube3x.com\/all-in-one-social\/"}

Number of Google Plus Shares

As of now, when I am writing this post there is no official API link from Google to fetch url share data. But people are using an unofficial api link to get url count.Here is the php code which retrieves the data count and return json object.

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if (preg_match('/\W/', $_GET['callback'])) {     header('HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request');     exit(); } header('Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate'); header('Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT'); header('Content-type: application/json; charset=utf-8'); if (isset($_GET['url'])) {     $url = $_GET['url'];     if ('/' != substr($url, -1))         $url = $url . '/'; } else {     die($_GET['callback'] . '({"error":"Invalid Input"})'); } $ch = curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "https://clients6.google.com/rpc?key=AIzaSyCKSbrvQasunBoV16zDH9R33D88CeLr9gQ"); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, '[{"method":"pos.plusones.get","id":"p","params":{"nolog":true,"id":"' . $url . '","source":"widget","userId":"@viewer","groupId":"@self"},"jsonrpc":"2.0","key":"p","apiVersion":"v1"}]'); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Content-type: application/json')); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false); $curl_results = curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); $json = json_decode($curl_results, true); $count = intval($json[0]['result']['metadata']['globalCounts']['count']); $data = array(); $data['plus_count'] = (string) $count; $data['url'] = $url; echo($_GET['callback'] . '(' . json_encode($data) . ')');

Do not worry about the length of the script. What you need to do is create a php file say ‘ajax-gplus.php’ and paste above code inside php tags. Call this file with query string parameter ‘url’. The query string is read by this php code and it will return the plus_count of that url.

Ref : http://cube3x.com/2013/01/get-social-share-counts-a-complete-guide/