How to read facebook likes count from PHP

When you add facebook like button to your site, probably, you also want to save the number of likes of your pages to your database.These data are very useful and very important because they tell you which of your articles are better than others. Moreover, these pages are better than others because the user has decided to tell his friends about it.

So you can use these likes to make a top stories section on your site as I make on the top of DailyBest.

You can read these data because facebook likes and facebook shares are public data in Open Graph, you don’t need any authentication process to read likes, they are public and you can easily read facebook likes count with php or with jquery. Here is the code to read facebook likes and shares count with php.

function readFacebookLikes($url) {
	$query = "select total_count from link_stat WHERE url ='" . $url ."'";
	$s = file_get_contents("https://api.facebook.com/method/fql.query?query=".
             urlencode($query)."&format=json");
	preg_match("#(\"total_count\"):([0-9]*)#",$s,$ar);
	if(isset($ar[2])) return $ar[2]; else return null;
}
echo readFacebookLikes("https://www.facebook.com/rockit.tuttarobaitaliana");
echo readFacebookLikes("http://www.dailybest.it");

This function will be added to Minibot class.

As you can see in the code you can just make a query using the fql language (it’s very similar to normal sql language) and retrieve data from the the facebook link_stat table. You can retrieve different data, I’ve used “total_count”:

This tecnique is used in my Top Social Stories Plugin for WordPress to build charts and monitor your top stories.