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

This way you can get it with jquery. The div id="twitterCount" will be populated automatic when the page is loaded.

     function getTwitterCount(url){
         var tweets;
         $.getJSON('http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=' + url + '&callback=?',             function(data){
         tweets = data.count;
         $('#twitterCount').html(tweets);
     });
     }
     var urlBase='http://http://stackoverflow.com';
     getTwitterCount(urlBase); 

Cheers!

Answer 2

Yes, there is. As long as you do the following:

1. Issue a JSONP request to one of the urls:

   http://cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=[URL_IN_REQUEST]&callback=[YOUR_CALLBACK]

   http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=[URL_IN_REQUEST]&callback=[YOUR_CALLBACK]

2. Make sure that the request you are making is from the same domain as the [URL_IN_REQUEST]. Otherwise, it will not work.

   Example:

   Making requests from example.com to request the count of example.com/page/1. Should work.

   Making requests from another-example.com to request the count of example.com/page/1. Will NOT work.

Answer 3

The approved reply is the right one. There are other versions of the same endpoint, used internally by Twitter.

For example, the official share button with count uses this one:

https://cdn.syndication.twitter.com/widgets/tweetbutton/count.json?url=[URL]

JSONP support is there adding &callback=func.

Answer 4

I know that is an old question but for me the url http://cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://stackoverflow.com did not work in ajax calls due to Cross-origin issues.

I solved using PHP CURL, I made a custom route and called it through ajax.

  /* Other Code */
  $options = array(
    CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,   // return web page
    CURLOPT_HEADER         => false,  // don't return headers
    CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true,   // follow redirects
    CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS      => 10,     // stop after 10 redirects
    CURLOPT_ENCODING       => "",     // handle compressed
    CURLOPT_USERAGENT      => "test", // name of client
    CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER    => true,   // set referrer on redirect
    CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 120,    // time-out on connect
    CURLOPT_TIMEOUT        => 120,    // time-out on response
);
$url = $_POST["url"]; //whatever you need
if($url !== ""){
    $curl = curl_init("http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=".$url);
    curl_setopt_array($curl, $options);
    $result = curl_exec($curl);
    curl_close($curl);
    echo json_encode(json_decode($result)); //whatever response you need
}

It is important to use a POST because passsing url in GET request cause issues.

Hope it helped.

Answer 5

This comment https://stackoverflow.com/a/8641185/1118419 proposes to use Topsy API. I am not sure that API is correct:

Twitter response for www.e-conomic.dk:

http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://www.e-conomic.dk

shows 10 count

Topsy response fro www.e-conomic.dk:

http://otter.topsy.com/stats.json?url=http://www.e-conomic.dk

18 count

Answer 6

This Javascript class will let you fetch share information from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Example of usage

<p>Facebook count: <span id="facebook_count"></span>.</p>
<p>Twitter count: <span id="twitter_count"></span>.</p>
<p>LinkedIn count: <span id="linkedin_count"></span>.</p>
<script type="text/javascript">
    var smStats=new SocialMediaStats('https://google.com/'); // Replace with your desired URL
    smStats.facebookCount('facebook_count'); // 'facebook_count' refers to the ID of the HTML tag where the result will be placed.
    smStats.twitterCount('twitter_count');
    smStats.linkedinCount('linkedin_count');    
</script>

Download

https://404it.no/js/blog/SocialMediaStats.js

More examples and documentation

Javascript Class For Getting URL Shares On Facebook, Twitter And LinkedIn