Number of followers in social media sites

Need help APIs
1

Hey Bubblers,

Looking to understand the easiest/most reliable way to get a user’s social media following stats (number fo followers, subscribers…).
Ideally they would enter their @name or url, and we could grab their number of followers on FB Page, Instagram, YoutTube, ect.

Is there a central service to connect to that would grab such number easily without configuring API for each social media site ?
Many thanks

2

Hi there, @akamelstudio… unfortunately (and to the best of my knowledge), the short answer to your question is no, so you would have to configure an API for each site.

Best…
Mike

4

Thank you for your quick answer.

to be honest I’m still new to APIs. I tried to make sens of the official facebook for developpers API and my understading is that the user needs to auhtorize the app access to his information to be able to make API calls?
Meaning if want to have just the number of followers for a facebook account, the user needs to grant my app access ?
Is my understading correct.

What is the alternative then if I want public information without the user’s auhtorization (many followers count)?
Many thanks.

5

Hey, as @mikeloc said, you have a few choices:

  1. Connect to each social network to pull the data. Twitter is the easiest from an API and approval standpoint. You best bet would be to spin up a server in Node or Python to use one of the many SDK packages to wrap the API calls, which you can then make from the API connector. Others, such as Facebook, are more difficult. You’ll need to build the app using test credentials, show them a demo and then request and give a justification for each permission. Expect to get reject the first few submissions. When you get permissions, you’ll do something called a 3-legged OAuth so your users can authorized you to access their data.
  2. My company offers social APIs so you don’t need to worry about approval or auths. Here are some videos and instructions on integrating social media with Bubble using the API Connector or plugin. Bubble.io - Ayrshare Docs

Best,

Geoff