The last article showed how to add a Facbook “Like” button to your website and observing the click event on the button to track and/or do something else with JavaScript when a user clicks on the “Like” button.

Now you might want to get some information on the URL via some automated processes like cronjobs etc. You can simply use FQL - the Facebook Query Language - for that purpose. FQL is similar to SQL but doesn’t support all of the features.

Using FQL

Here is some FQL to get some statistics for a link:

SELECT  like_count, total_count, share_count, click_count from link_stat  where  url="http://www.saschakimmel.com/2010/05/how-to-capture-clicks-on-the-facebook-like-button/"

You can simply use a Facebook API client SDK or access the data directly via the URL even in your browser:

https://api.facebook.com/method/fql.query?query=select%20%20like_count,%20total_count,%20share_count,%20click_count%20from%20link_stat%20where%20url=%22http://www.saschakimmel.com/2010/05/how-to-capture-clicks-on-the-facebook-like-button/%22

This will return XML like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<fql_query_response xmlns="http://api.facebook.com/1.0/" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" list="true">
 <link_stat>
 <like_count>4</like_count>
 <total_count>5</total_count>
 <share_count>1</share_count>
 <click_count>0</click_count>
 </link_stat>
</fql_query_response>

This means you can also use something like cURL or even PHP’s file_get_contents() method to obtain this information and parse it with SimpleXML, DOM or even regular expressions.

Facebook doesn’t seem to define any specific API call limit but there seems to be a limit to the number of calls per day.

Pitfalls

The Facebook API doesn’t support “LIKE” queries in FQL so you cannot find out how many pages on your website were liked directly - only by querying like described above for every single URL on your website.

I hope this short article is useful for you. If you like it why not just click on the “Like” button below?