Social Share Count API

A simple PHP script to fetch the count of social shares on Facebook, Twitter, Google +1, Reddit, LinkedIn, Delicious, StumbleUpon and Pinterest as JSON, JSONP or XML data with the option to cache the results using memcache, APC or file cache.

Instructions

The API URL is https://count.donreach.com/ and allows the following parameters:

Parameter	Default	Description
url (required)	none	The URL of the page you want to fetch the social shares for.
format (optional)	json	The format of the output. Can be either json, jsonp or xml.
callback (optional)	processShares	The JavaScript callback to execute.
services (optional)	none (all)	A comma separated list of services to fetch share count for.

Social Shares as JSON Data

Since JSON is the default format https://count.donreach.com/?url=http://9gag.com outputs:

{
	url: "http://9gag.com",
	shares: {
		total: 635992,
		facebook: 206570,
		twitter: 119585,
		google: 89490,
		linkedin: 618,
		pinterest: 5234,
		stumbleupon: 203013,
		delicious: 0,
		reddit: 0,
		buffer: 752,
		vk: 10730
	}
}

Social Shares as JSONP Data

To use JSONP you can either specify the format or set a callback.
For example both https://count.donreach.com/?url=http://9gag.com&format=jsonp and https://count.donreach.com/?url=http://9gag.com&callback=processShares would output:

processShares({
	url: "http://9gag.com",
	shares: {
		total: 635992,
		facebook: 206570,
		twitter: 119585,
		google: 89490,
		linkedin: 618,
		pinterest: 5234,
		stumbleupon: 203013,
		delicious: 0,
		reddit: 0,
		buffer: 752,
		vk: 10730
	}
})

Social Shares as XML Data

To get the data in XML just set the format variable: https://count.donreach.com/?url=http://9gag.com&format=xml outputs:

<data>
	<url>http://9gag.com</url>
	<shares>
		<total>432979</total>
		<facebook>206570</facebook>
		<twitter>119585</twitter>
		<google>89490</google>
		<linkedin>618</linkedin>
		<pinterest>5234</pinterest>
		<stumbleupon>0</stumbleupon>
		<delicious>0</delicious>
		<reddit>0</reddit>
		<buffer>752</buffer>
		<vk>10730</vk>
	</shares>
</data>

Social shares for specific networks

To speed up loading times, you can specify the services that you would like to fetch share counts for. https://count.donreach.com/?url=http://9gag.com&services=facebook,google outputs:

{
	url: "http://9gag.com",
	shares: {
		total: 296060,
		facebook: 206570,
		google: 89490,
	}
}

jQuery & Bootstrap Example

In the following example we're going to display a few pretty Bootstrap buttons with FontAwesome icons and the social share count in bubbles.

The JavaScript

$(document).ready(function () {
    // Get current URL from canonical tag
    var shareUrl = $("link[rel=canonical]").attr("href");

    // Ajax request to read share counts. Notice "&callback=?" is appended to the URL to define it as JSONP.
    $.getJSON('https://count.donreach.com/?url=' + encodeURIComponent(shareUrl) + "&callback=?", function (data) {
        shares = data.shares;
        $(".count").each(function (index, el) {
            service = $(el).parents(".share-btn").attr("data-service");
            count = shares[service];

            // Divide large numbers eg. 5500 becomes 5.5k
            if(count>1000) {
                count = (count / 1000).toFixed(1);
                if(count>1000) count = (count / 1000).toFixed(1) + "M";
                else count = count + "k";
            }
            $(el).html(count);
        });
    });
});

The HTML

<div class='share'>
    <div class='share-btn' data-service="total">
        <div class="count h4"></div>
        <div class="h3">SOCIAL</div>
        <div class="h2">SHARES</div>
    </div>
    <div class='share-btn' data-service="facebook">
        <div class="count"></div> <a class="btn btn-primary"><i class="fa fa-facebook fa-fw fa-3x"></i></a>
    </div>
    <div class='share-btn' data-service="twitter">
        <div class="count"></div> <a class="btn btn-primary"><i class="fa fa-twitter fa-fw fa-3x"></i></a>
    </div>
    <div class='share-btn' data-service="google">
        <div class="count"></div> <a class="btn btn-primary"><i class="fa fa-google-plus fa-fw fa-3x"></i></a>
    </div>
</div>

The CSS

.share-btn {
    float: left;
    margin:60px 10px;
    position: relative;
}
.share-btn .count {
    border: 1px solid #ccc;
    height: 40px;
    line-height: 40px;
    position: absolute;
    border-radius: 4px;
    padding: 0 5px;
    display: inline-block;
    text-align: center;
    white-space: nowrap;
    vertical-align: middle;
    background: #fff;
    bottom:100%;
    left:0;
    right:0;
    margin-bottom:10px;
}

See a working demo

Here is a working fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/XM7x7/

Host it yourself

Download the package and unzip in on your computer. Open config.php with a text-editor of your choice and amend the few configuration values, then upload the whole folder to your server.

Copyright

© 2013-2014 Adam Bouqdib - http://abemedia.co.uk

Released under GNU GPL 2. See licence.md for further information.