Socialworth

A simple PHP library for determining the popularity of a given URL by querying social network APIs.

It presently supports:

• Twitter (counts mentions and retweets)
• Facebook (counts likes, comments and shares)
• Google+ (+1s)
• Pinterest (shares)
• Reddit (counts submitted stories and upvotes)
• StumbleUpon views
• LinkedIn shares
• Hacker News API service is currently offline.
• Mozscape Backlinks Retired.

There a variety of use cases for this library; generating a list of your blog's most popular articles for optimizing placement, or featuring social network counters on your pages without relying on bloated external JavaScript includes.

Installation

To add this package as a dependency for your project, simply add evansims/socialworth to your project's composer.json file. Here is an example of a minimal composer.json file:

{
    "require": {
        "evansims/socialworth": "*"
    }
}

Then run composer install to install the library. Composer generates a vendor/autoload.php file that you'll need to include in your project before invoking Socialworth:

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

Usage

To query all supported services for a URL:

<?php
use Evansims\Socialworth;

$socialworth = new Socialworth('https://github.com/');
var_dump($socialworth->all());
?>

Alternatively you can query just one service:

<?php
use Evansims\Socialworth;

var_dump(Socialworth::twitter('https://github.com/'));
?>

Or leave out specific services from your query:

<?php
use Evansims\Socialworth;

$socialworth = new Socialworth('https://github.com/');
$socialworth->linkedin = false;

var_dump($socialworth->all());
?>

The all() method will return an object that you can use to grab individual service results or find the combined popularity from the services:

<?php
use Evansims\Socialworth;

$socialworth = new Socialworth('https://github.com/');
$response = $socialworth->all();

var_dump($response->total); // Total likes, shares, upvotes, etc.
var_dump($response->reddit); // Just shares and upvotes from reddit.
var_dump($response->twitter); // Just mentions, retweets and shares on Twitter.
?>

Demo Script

A demo script is provided that allows you to query the library from your browser, or the command line.

To call the script from the command line ...

$ php demo.php https://github.com/

Or, to query individual services ...

$ php demo.php --twitter --facebook https://github.com/

If the demo script is accessible from your web server, you can pass a url ...

http://localhost/path/to/demo.php?url=https://github.com/

Whether from the CLI or the browser, you will receive a JSON object back.

{
    "total": 48217,
    "twitter": 26582,
    "facebook": 15284,
    "pinterest": 157,
    "reddit": 5,
    "googleplus": 6049,
    "stumbleupon": 297,
    "linkedin": 0
}

This work was inspired by Jonathan Moore's gist: https://gist.github.com/2640302