Is there a way to programmatically check if a user shared a link on Facebook?

Question

I\'m currently using jQuery to record each click on a Facebook share link on my site, but I\'m looking for a more accurate solution. Instead of recording the clicks, I\'d like t

Answer 1

As of Apr 2016, Twitter has deprecated v1 of their api and don't provide an alternate for the previous method to determine shares for a link. You'll need to use their Search api which only maintains share count for last 7 days and now you need to subscribe to their streaming api to maintain your own long running count.

Alternatively, you could use a free service like http://newsharecounts.com or http://opensharecount.com/ so they can subscribe to the api on your behalf and maintain the count. However, expect that share count could take a minute (or more) to update.

From newsharecounts FAQ -

"No matter how big your website is, or how old your content is, we detect new shares within 1 minute on average"

From opensharecount.com homepage -

"It can take some time for search results to come in, so initially the count that is reported will be zero on all links. Contact us if after one hour it is still zero. "

Re: FB sharing (http://graph.facebook.com/(url)), note that its possible for the user to use the share dialog and choose the 'Only Me' option and it is still counted in the same way as if they had shared with their friends. Know that the sharer can also delete the post shortly afterwards but future calls to the api will not reflect that.