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Get Facebook Fan Count Using get_transient and wp_remote_get

Snippets by IsItWP

Do you want to get your Facebook fan count and display it on your website? While there’s probably a plugin for this, we have created a quick code snippet that you can use to get Facebook fan count using wp_remote_get.

Instructions:

All you have to do is add this code to your theme’s functions.php file or in a site-specific plugin:

function get_fan_count(){

         $fb_id = '106900272716297';
         $count = get_transient('fan_count');

    if ($count !== false) return $count;
         $count = 0;
         $data = wp_remote_get('http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?method=facebook.fql.query&query=SELECT%20fan_count%20FROM%20page%20WHERE%20page_id='.$fb_id.'');

   if (is_wp_error($data)) {
         return 'whoa error!!!';
   }else{
         $count = strip_tags($data[body]);
   }
set_transient('fan_count', $count, 60*60*24); // 24 hour cache
return $count;
}

Add this code snippet into your WordPress theme file where you want to display the Facebook fan count.

<? echo get_fan_count(); ?>

Note: If this is your first time adding code snippets in WordPress, then please refer to our guide on how to properly copy / paste code snippets in WordPress, so you don’t accidentally break your site.

If you liked this code snippet, please consider checking out our other articles on the site like: 9 best WordPress help desk plugins for customer support and 50+ best WooCommerce themes for your online store.

Comments   Leave a Reply

  1. Hi, great stuff! How would ony display the total count (FB + Twitter) using this method?

  2. Everytimes it shows 616 counts in echo. My fanpage has 135k fans. I checked the the direct api url. It shows 135967

  3. didn’t work for me 🙁 anyway thanks for sharing

  4. Display Number of Twitter, Facebook and RSS Subscribers October 31, 2011 at 8:00 am

    […] initially, you need to paste the following snippet into your functionality plugin (thanks to Kevin Chard for the basis of this […]

  5. Awesome! Just what I was looking for…

    1. Cool glad to help!

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