Is there a way to get the twitter share count for a specific URL?

Question

I looked through the API documentation but couldn't find it. It would be nice to grab that number to see how popular a url is. Engadget uses the twitter share button on articles if you're looking for an example. I'm attempting to do this through javascript. Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

You can use the following API endpoint,

http://cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://stackoverflow.com 

_{Note that the http://urls.api.twitter.com/ endpoint is not public.)}

The endpoint will return a JSON string similar to,

{"count":27438,"url":"http:\/\/stackoverflow.com\/"} 

On the client, if you are making a request to get the URL share count for your own domain (the one the script is running from), then an AJAX request will work (e.g. jQuery.getJSON). Otherwise, issue a JSONP request by appending callback=?:

jQuery.getJSON('https://cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://stackoverflow.com/&callback=?', function (data) {      jQuery('#so-url-shares').text(data.count);  });

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>  <div id="so-url-shares">Calculating...</div>

Update:

As of 21st November 2015, this way of getting twitter share count, does not work anymore. Read more at: https://blog.twitter.com/2015/hard-decisions-for-a-sustainable-platform