Custom social buttons with counters?

Question

How would one go about creating custom social buttons (specifically Post to Twitter, Facebook, Stumblepon, Reddit) - with counters. The buttons need the same consistent styling as part of a design and we ideally don't want to use the out-of-the-box ones as such.

Creating custom buttons is easy - but custom counters I'm not sure about. How could this be achieved?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Answer 1

A number of social sites provide APIs methods for getting the share count for a specific URL. Some of the API methods are internal and not publicly supported.

• LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com/countserv/count/share?url=http://news.ycombinator.com
• Facebook - http://graph.facebook.com/http://news.ycombinator.com

Twitter has removed their undocumented API endpoint.

• Twitter - http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://news.ycombinator.com