Frequently Asked Questions

Quick setup

After creating a free SharedCount account, you can find your API key in your account dashboard.

Make your first API call

Send a GET request to the URL endpoint, replacing the placeholder with your API key:

https://api.sharedcount.com/v1.1/?apikey=YOUR_API_KEY&url=https://nytimes.com/

For more request examples and a live playground, see the API documentation.

Troubleshoot an invalid API key

If the API returns {"Error":"API Key is invalid or not yet detected"}, confirm that you are sending a GET request and that the API key exactly matches the key in your dashboard.

Use the Facebook Sharing Debugger to compare the reactions, comments, shares, and total engagement Facebook reports for a URL with the SharedCount API response.

Facebook applies privacy-related approximation to engagement data. SharedCount therefore reports the approximate value Facebook returns, which can differ slightly from the Debugger.

Small variations are expected. A large difference usually points to a URL variation, redirect, or canonical-metadata issue.

SharedCount queries the exact URL you submit. Facebook can store engagement separately for variations of the same address, including:

• http:// versus https://
• With or without the www. subdomain
• With or without a trailing slash

When those variations resolve to the same canonical destination, Facebook may aggregate their engagement. Otherwise, their counts can remain separate.

Shortened and redirected links are resolved to their final destination. Engagement with the short URL can therefore contribute to the canonical destination instead of remaining attached to the submitted URL.

Facebook may also aggregate engagement under the URL declared by an Open Graph og:url tag or an HTML canonical link.

Use the Facebook Sharing Debugger to see the fetched URL, redirect path, and canonical destination Facebook resolved.

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Suppose the requested page is:

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/mex_23_2784

If that page declares the press-corner home page as its canonical destination, Facebook can attribute the detail page's engagement to that different URL.

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Keep the HTML canonical link and Open Graph og:url value consistent and point both to the intended page:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/mex_23_2784">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/mex_23_2784">

After publishing the correction, enter the URL in the Facebook Sharing Debugger and select Scrape Again so Facebook refreshes the metadata.

Some URLs can still produce limited or unexpected results when canonical or Open Graph metadata is missing, incorrect, or inconsistent across related pages.

SharedCount currently reports engagement for:

• Facebook
• Pinterest

There is no separate request rate limit as long as you remain within the daily quota assigned to your API key.

You can review your current usage and remaining allowance in your account dashboard or with the quota endpoint.

Without overages enabled

Requests beyond your daily quota are rejected with an HTTP 403 quota_exceeded error. You will not incur additional fees while overages are disabled.

With overages enabled

You can enable overages from your account. Requests can then continue beyond the daily quota, and additional usage is billed at the rate for your plan. Current rates are listed on the pricing page and are calculated daily.

Personal plan example

A day with 12,000 requests is 2,000 requests over the 10,000-request quota. At $1 per 5,000 additional requests, that day's overage charge is $0.40.

Daily usage resets at midnight Pacific Time.

A standard URL lookup can return these fields in its Facebook object:

total_count

Total engagement associated with the URL, including reactions, comments, and shares.

comment_count

Facebook comments associated with the URL.

reaction_count

Reactions such as Like, Love, and Wow.

share_count

Times Facebook recorded the URL as shared.

comment_plugin_count

Comments made through the Facebook Comments plugin on third-party websites.

Use total_count for overall engagement and share_count when you need shares specifically. A share distributes the URL; a reaction is an interaction such as Like or Love.

Facebook may include private sharing in the aggregate engagement count it reports. SharedCount receives only that aggregate and cannot identify private posts or the people behind them.

SharedCount reports the all-time engagement count available when you make the query.

No. SharedCount does not support Facebook pages, profiles, image links, or other URLs on the facebook.com domain. It measures how public web URLs are shared on supported networks.

SharedCount is a service that looks up how many times a public URL has been shared or engaged with on supported social networks.

SharedCount queries supported social networks directly and returns their reported engagement data through the API and dashboard.

Results may be cached for 20–60 minutes, so repeated requests during that window can return the same value.

No. SharedCount returns aggregate engagement counts, not the individual posts or people behind them. To find specific posts, query the social network directly or use a social listening service.