How to get number of likes from facebook like button?

Question

How to get number of likes from facebook like button? Is there any possible way to do this?

Nieshanieto

Answer 1

There are two ways to get the number of facebook likes.

1. Graph API

http://graph.facebook.com/?ids=http%3a%2f%2ffacebook.com

Result is JSON: (For some reason 'likes' are called 'shares')

{
   "http://facebook.com": {
      "id": "http://facebook.com",
      "shares": 35641554,
      "comments": 339
   }
}

2. FQL

http://api.facebook.com/method/fql.query?query=select+total_count+from+link_stat+where+url="http://facebook.com"'

Result:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<fql_query_response xmlns="http://api.facebook.com/1.0/" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" list="true">
  <link_stat>
    <total_count>35641554</total_count>
  </link_stat>
</fql_query_response>

Frisette

Reason this called shares is probably cause of statements on Like Button documentation, read What makes up the number shown on my Like button? section – Radferd

Do you know the limit/ the number of links you can get stats of in only one request? I need this information in my design but cannot find it in the documentation. Thanks a lot. – Milson

FQL won't be available anymore from August 2016: developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql – Funnyman