Adding a “most liked post” box, based on facebook ranking?

Question

I would like to have a list of my most liked posts from facebook, and place it in the sidebar. Is there a way for doing it? (and if so, how?)

Answer 1

A quick google brought up these, which led me to this post.

1. You can access the site's object in the Graph and get the current "Fan count". i.e. http://graph.facebook.com/http://google.com. Note that you will need an oauth token to do this. This is definitely the most accurate way of getting a page's Likes.

2. You can also use the javascript SDK to detect when a user clicks the Like button and then make an ajax call in the background to a php page that adds to a counter or does whatever you want it to. You can also detect when a user Unlikes a page too.

In other words, 1) queries Facebook for the number of likes, 2) suggests to hook into the 'liking' action, counting & logging the 'likes' on your site.

Either way you're going to need to get stuck in to the Facebook API. If you go for 1), you'll also need the PHP SDK.

I'd say 1) would be the better of the two, since it's non-JavaScript dependent, and getting 'likes' from other sources won't affect it (i.e. people liking your page using means other than the button on your site).

Since it looks like you can only query one page (URL) at a time (unless a Facebook guru can correct me?), you'd need some way of frequently caching the like counts of all your posts.

Perhaps a wp_cron function that continually loops over say, 20 posts, every hour (check Facebook usage terms), and updates the like count as a post meta entry.

To get the 'most liked' posts, you could then simply query posts that have the meta key, and order by the meta value.

new WP_Query( array( 'meta_key' => 'like_count', 'orderby' => 'meta_value_num', 'posts_per_page' => 5 ) );

Answer 2

You can stick https://graph.facebook.com/ in front of any URL to see how many people liked it. It returns a JSON object with the URL and the number of "shares" for the URL.

Note: An OAuth token is not required to do this. You don't even have to be logged into Facebook.

Example: https://graph.facebook.com/http://ottopress.com/2011/photo-gallery-primer/

Over time, you can poll those, store the info as meta data, and then order by it.

Related question: Top 3 posts in last week ordered by Facebook and Twitter share counts