Is there a way to get the twitter share count for a specific URL?

Question

I looked through the API documentation but couldn\'t find it. It would be nice to grab that number to see how popular a url is. Engadget uses the twitter share button on a

Answer 1

You can use the following API endpoint,

http://cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://stackoverflow.com

_{Note that the http://urls.api.twitter.com/ endpoint is not public.)}

The endpoint will return a JSON string similar to,

{"count":27438,"url":"http:\/\/stackoverflow.com\/"}

On the client, if you are making a request to get the URL share count for your own domain (the one the script is running from), then an AJAX request will work (e.g. jQuery.getJSON). Otherwise, issue a JSONP request by appending callback=?:

jQuery.getJSON('https://cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://stackoverflow.com/&callback=?', function (data) {
    jQuery('#so-url-shares').text(data.count);
});

Calculating...

Update:

As of 21st November 2015, this way of getting twitter share count, does not work anymore. Read more at: https://blog.twitter.com/2015/hard-decisions-for-a-sustainable-platform