Get the number of facebook *shares* of a specific URL

Question

I've found some discrepancies in the graph api and was wondering if anybody has been able to work around them.

https://graph.facebook.com/?id=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/ outputs a "likes" number together with all of the open graph info provided by imdb, associated to its fb:app_id. https://graph.facebook.com/?id=http://www.google.com however, outputs the "shares" number, as google doesn't provide an fb:app_id or fb:admins.

My problem is that I need the "shares" number for the first URL, as it corresponds with the number exposed in its like button (likes + comments, etc.)

Is there any way to reliably get this "shares" number for any URL?

Answer 1

This API is no longer available. The answer below is no longer valid.

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I could get stats of a page (say http://techcrunch.com) with just a GET request to API. Just place this GET request http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?method=links.getStats&urls=[YOUR_URL] and get the stats.

like http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?method=links.getStats&urls=http://techcrunch.com/ returns

<links_getStats_response xsi:schemaLocation="http://api.facebook.com/1.0/ http://api.facebook.com/1.0/facebook.xsd" list="true">
    <link_stat>
        <url>http://techcrunch.com/</url>
        <normalized_url>http://www.techcrunch.com/</normalized_url>
        <share_count>6244</share_count>
        <like_count>1513</like_count>
        <comment_count>1391</comment_count>
        <total_count>9148</total_count>
        <click_count>4007</click_count>
        <comments_fbid>433841427570</comments_fbid>
        <commentsbox_count>4</commentsbox_count>
    </link_stat>
</links_getStats_response>

Hope this helps.

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Also,

If you want that response as a JSON, just append &format=json to request URL – Dexter
(from the comment. Thanks Dexter!)