Question

Can any one help how to get facebook recommended count in php.

I search for facebook api but i dint found any.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

A Recommendation is a Like. You can see it in the reference of the like button :

action – the verb to display on the button. Options: ‘like’, ‘recommend’

To get the counts for a URL (here http://stackoverflow.com), you can make an FQL call :

 SELECT url, share_count, like_count, comment_count, total_count
 FROM link_stat WHERE url="http://stackoverflow.com"

Call directly

$fql = 'SELECT url, share_count, like_count, comment_count, total_count
        FROM link_stat WHERE url="http://stackoverflow.com"';
$json = file_get_contents('https://api.facebook.com/method/fql.query?format=json&query=' . urlencode($fql));

And $json will contain :

[
    {
        "url"           : "http://stackoverflow.com",
        "share_count"   : 1353,
        "like_count"    : 332,
        "comment_count" : 538,
        "total_count"   : 2223
    }
]

You have here :

• share_count : the counts of shares for the URL
• like_count : the count of likes (= recommendations)
• comment_count : the count of comments in Facebook below shares of that link
• total_count : the sum of theses 3 counts

You can read json in PHP with json_decode :

$data = json_decode($json);
echo  $data[0]->like_count;

Use the Facebook PHP SDK

EDIT : As Rufinus pointed out int the comments of his answer, for stability reasons, if you are on a long term project and not just a quick experiment you should use the Facebook PHP SDK (see on github) to make FQL queries : Facebook is more and more closing public access (read without access token) to its API (see this blog post on Facebook developers blog). Even like here when theses queries are not related to any user : the SDK is using the app access token to make the query.

require "facebook.php";
$facebook = new Facebook(array(
    'appId'  => YOUR_APP_ID,
    'secret' => YOUR_APP_SECRET,
));

$fql = 'SELECT url, share_count, like_count, comment_count, click_count, total_count 
        FROM link_stat WHERE url="http://stackoverflow.com"';

$result = $facebook->api(array(
    'method' => 'fql.query',
    'query' => $fql,
));

The $result array contains what you need (like_count field) and even more :

Array (
    [0] => Array (
        [url] => http://stackoverflow.com
        [share_count] => 1356
        [like_count] => 332
        [comment_count] => 538
        [click_count] => 91
        [total_count] => 2226
    )
)