How do I track Facebook Like Button clicks?

Question

I am building a simple website. I am going to put Facebook Like Button on each article page of this website. How can I track how many people Liked this particular article? Does facebook provide an API for that?

Clarification

I am going to write a script that is going to pull the amount of "likes" for each page every hour. This would allow me to build a popularity graph.

Answer 1

You will need to run FQL on link_stat table providing url of your article and retrieving like_count field. You can run FQL using FB.Data.query() from JS SDK.