Display Facebook likes / Shares PHP function

We launched a new product at Harkable last week called Daily Pulse – which tracks social data for any URL, you can also subscribe to receive email reports. I thought i’d share a bit of functionality similar to how we engineer Daily Pulse.

The Code

Below is a super simple function that retrieves a JSON feed of comments, likes and shares for any URL you provide.

function facebook_shares($url){

	$fql  = "SELECT url, normalized_url, share_count, like_count, comment_count, ";
	$fql .= "total_count, commentsbox_count, comments_fbid, click_count FROM ";
	$fql .= "link_stat WHERE url = '".$url."'";
	
	$apifql="https://api.facebook.com/method/fql.query?format=json&query=".urlencode($fql);
	$fb_json=file_get_contents($apifql);
	return json_decode($fb_json);
	
}

How to use

$fb = facebook_shares('https://www.facebook.com/redbull');

// facebook share count
echo $fb[0]->share_count;

// facebook like count
echo $fb[0]->like_count;

// facebook comment count
echo $fb[0]->comment_count;