Facebook sharing data for url

Question

I am working on a project to get shares for different articles of the client. I searched whole internet but did not find any info so as a last resort putting the question here: Is there a way to check how many shares an article has on facebook by giving just the url of the article? I have seen code on facebook where you can get number of likes for your own article you paste but is there a way to tell lets say if some techcruch article has how many facebook shares?

Answer 1

Here is the reference: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/link_stat/

Sample query to get number of shares for a Techcrunch article:

SELECT url, normalized_url, share_count, like_count, comment_count, total_count, commentsbox_count, comments_fbid, click_count FROM link_stat WHERE url="http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/25/zipongo-seed-round/"

You can play around with different queries here: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer (choose FQL from the menu)