Facebook Likes/Shares Checker for a Webpage
Facebook integration is by now ‘a must’ for websites. By providing tools to share or like your site to Facebook, it gives your site a lot more opportunity to get read and seen by the 500 million ++ users of Facebook. Facebook has developed several simple to use API’s for this which can be found here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/web. Statistics can be monitored in http://www.facebook.com/insights, however the data presented is far from complete. For example, something as simple as monitoring how many people has “shared” or “liked” your website is not easily determined. Fortunately there’s a handy link for checking the number of Facebook “likes” or “shares” of a given Web Page URL also provided by Facebook but not as known: http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?method=links.getStats&urls=http://www.eacomm.com The above query will return an XML document in the following format: <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?> <links_getStats_response xmlns=”http://api.facebook.com/1.0/” xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance” xsi:schemaLocation=”http://api.facebook.com/1.0/ http://api.facebook.com/1.0/facebook.xsd” list=”true”> <link_stat> <url>http://www.eacomm.com</url> <share_count>3</share_count> <like_count>3</like_count> <comment_count>13</comment_count> <total_count>19</total_count> <click_count>0</click_count> <normalized_url>http://www.eacomm.com/</normalized_url> </link_stat> </links_getStats_response> This can then be parsed by a simple application to store the statistics in a database. For example in PHP you can use the simlexml_load_file to parse this. Below is a very simple code (admittedly not very elegant, but it works) to do this: $url = “http://www.eacomm.com”; $xml = simplexml_load_file(“http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?method=links.getStats&urls=$url”); $child=$xml->children(); $child2=$child->children(); $shares=$child2->share_count; $likes=$child2->like_count; $comments=$child2->comment_count; $total=$child2->total_count; $clicks=$child2->click_count; You can now store the shares, likes, etc. in a database and monitor for yourself how your website is performing in Facebook. Below is a form to check if your site has been ‘shared’ in Facebook: http://www.eacomm.com/fblikecheck.php Facebook Likes/Shares Checker: Enter the Web Page you want to check: