How to Display Social Media Followers Count in WordPress

Do you want to easily display social media followers count as text in WordPress?

Displaying social media followers count helps you add social proof to your website, strengthens your brand identity, and helps you grow your business.

In this article, we will show you how to easily display social media followers count as text in WordPress.

Why Show Social Media Followers Count on Your Website?

You may have noticed that many of the popular blogs, influencers, and brands proudly display their social media follower count on their websites.

Followers count helps you add social proof to your WordPress website. This allows you to earn users’ trust and build brand identity by showing your previous customers and followers as proof.

Plus, it helps you get more followers on your social media profiles while providing users with convenient ways to stay in touch.

Unfortunately, it is not as simple or easy to display social media followers count as we would like it to be, but it is most definitely possible.

Many social media platforms require API keys to fetch this information, and each of them has a different way of doing this.

Luckily, there are several WordPress plugins and solutions that make it possible for you to display your social media follower count.

That being said, we will show you different ways to display your social media follower count on your WordPress website. You can choose one that works best for you:

Method 1: Display Social Media Follower Count Using a Plugin

This method is easier and allows you to skip the API Keys requirement if you are unable to get them.

However, it is a bit unreliable and may not be able to fetch the follower count in real time. That’s because social media platforms change their API key methods quite frequently, which breaks applications using the old methods.

The good thing is that the plugin provides a fallback option to enter your social media followers manually as text.

First, you need to install and activate the Wp Social Login and Register Social Counter plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to go to the WP Social » Social Counter page from the WordPress dashboard and switch to the Providers tab.

From here, turn on each social media platform that you want to display and then click on the Settings button to set it up.

This will bring up a popup where you can provide your social media profile details for that platform. You’ll also find an option to enter a default Facebook follower count manually.

Repeat the process for all social media platforms that you want to display.

Once finished, you can go to the Appearance » Widgets page and add the WSLU Social Counter widget to your sidebar.

Don’t forget to save your changes and preview your website.

Want to display social media follower count in a post or page? Simply edit the post or page where you want to show the follower count and add the following shortcode in the content editor.

[xs_social_counter]

After that, you can click the ‘Publish’ or ‘Update’ button to store your settings.

You can now visit your WordPress site to view your social media follower count in action.

Method 2: Display Social Media Feeds With Smash Balloon

An easier alternative to showing social media follower counts is showing your social feeds with Smash Balloon.

Smash Balloon is the best social media plugin for WordPress. It allows you to display content from your social media as feeds with beautiful layouts.

First, you need to visit the Smash Balloon website. They offer different social media feed plugins for Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and a combined Social Wall feed.

We recommend getting the All Access Bundle, which gives you all the plugins.

After signing up, you can log in to your account on Smash Balloon and download the plugins to your computer.

Next, you can go ahead and install Smash Balloon feed plugins one by one. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

For the sake of this tutorial, we will show you how to create a social wall that helps you connect all your social media feeds and display them as one.

Note: To do this, you will need the Social Wall plugin by Smash Balloon as well as the feed plugin.

Upon activation, visit the Social Wall menu tab from the WordPress dashboard and click the ‘Add New’ button at the top.

This will take you to a new screen where you will see the list of social media platforms with buttons to connect them. Go ahead and click the ‘Add to Wall’ button for the platform with the feeds you want to show on your social wall.

This will show a list of the feeds that you have already created and want to add to your social wall.

For detailed instructions, you may want to see our following tutorials on how to create social media feeds with Smash Balloon:

• How to show Instagram feed in WordPress
• How to display Facebook posts in WordPress
• How to display the latest Tweets in WordPress

After selecting the feeds, click the ‘Create Wall’ button at the top.

This will launch the Smash Balloon visual editor, where you will see a preview of your social wall on the right with customization settings on the left.

From here, you can change the layout and color palette, add load more buttons, and more. For details, see our tutorial on how to add your social media feeds to WordPress.

Finally, click the ‘Save’ button at the top to store your settings. Then, click the ‘Embed’ button.

This will open a prompt on the screen from where you can copy the shortcode for the social wall that you created.

Next, exit the feed editor and open the page or post where you want to add the social wall in the block editor.

From here, click the ‘Add Block’ (+) button at the top left corner of the screen to open the block menu. Then, add the Social Wall block to the page/post.

Go ahead and paste the shortcode that you copied earlier into the ‘Shortcode Settings’ box in the block panel on the right.

Finally, click the ‘Publish’ or ‘Update’ button to store your settings. You have now successfully added a social wall with feeds for your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts on your website.

Method 3: Manually Fetch & Display Follower Count Using Code

This method is a bit advanced and may not work very well for beginners. However, it will help you fetch the social media follower count as text.

Basically, most social media platforms require you to create an app and user API keys to retrieve data like follower count from their servers.

In this method, we will show you how to get a follower count for Twitter and Facebook using API keys.

You’ll need to add custom code to your WordPress website. If you haven’t done this before, then take a look at our guide on how to copy and paste code in WordPress.

Show Facebook Follower Count Using Code

To fetch the Facebook follower count, you will need to do the following:

1. Create a Facebook app to get access to Facebook APIs.
2. Generate an access token. This acts as a password and lets you fetch the information you need.
3. Use the Facebook app and access token to get Facebook likes on WordPress.

1. Create Facebook App

Let’s start by creating a Facebook app. Simply go to the Meta Developers website and click on the ‘Create App’ button.

After that, you will be asked to choose an app type.

Click on ‘Business’ and then click on the ‘Next’ button to continue.

After that, you will be asked to give your app name (this could be anything you want) and email address.

You can skip the business account option and click on the ‘Create App’ button.

You may be prompted to enter your Facebook password.

You will then be redirected to your app dashboard.

On this screen, you will see multiple options, but since we are using the app for personal use, we don’t need these options at the moment.

2. Get Access Token for Facebook API

Next, you need to head over to the Graph API explorer page to generate our access token and get our page ID.

First, select the app you created under the Facebook App section.

After that, click on the ‘Get Token’ drop-down menu and select the ‘Page Access Token’ option.

This will bring up the permissions popup, where you need to continue as your personal account and then choose the page you want to get an access token for.

Next, you will be shown some permissions and warnings.

You can ignore these and click ‘Done’.

Facebook will now generate an access token for you.

Simply copy and paste the access token into your computer using a plain text editor like Notepad or TextEdit.

Before you leave, the next thing you need is the Page ID.

To get this, you need to enter your page URL slug in the form above and then click on the ‘Submit’ button.

You can now copy and paste the Page ID on your computer using a plain text editor like Notepad or TextEdit.

3. Display Facebook Likes in WordPress

First, copy and paste the following code to your WordPress theme’s functions.php file or use WPCode (recommended):

function getFacebookLike( $fbid, $token ){ 
$json_string = @file_get_contents('https://graph.facebook.com/v14.0/'. esc_attr( $fbid ) .'/?fields=fan_count&access_token='. esc_attr( $token ) );
$json = json_decode($json_string, true); 
$like_count = isset( $json['fan_count'] ) ? $json['fan_count'] : 0;
return $like_count;
}

For more details, you can see our guide on how to add custom code in WordPress.

Next, you need to paste the following code in your WordPress theme template where you want to display the Facebook Like count as text:

<?php 
echo "<p>More than <strong>" . getFacebookLike( $fbid = 'Facebook page ID', 'access token' ) .  "</strong> users follow us on Facebook.</p> "; 
?>

Don’t forget to replace the Facebook page ID and access token with the values you copied earlier.

You can now visit your website to see your code in action. Here is how it looked on our test website.

Show Twitter Follower Count as Text

To get Twitter followers to count as text, you’ll need to follow these steps:

1. Create a Twitter App.
2. Get the Twitter API key.
3. Fetch the follower count in WordPress.

1. Create a Twitter App and Get API Keys

First, you need to visit the Twitter Developer website and create a new standalone app.

You’ll be asked to provide a name for your app.

You can choose any name you want.

Next, you will see API keys for your app.

Go ahead and copy these keys on your computer using a plain text editor like Notepad or TextEdit.

2- Fetch Twitter Follower Count in WordPress

Next, you need to add the following code to your theme’s functions.php file or using WPCode (recommended):

function getTwitterFollowers($screenName = 'wpbeginner')
{
    // some variables
    $consumerKey = 'API key';
    $consumerSecret = 'API key secret';
    $token = get_option('cfTwitterToken');
 
    // get follower count from cache
    $numberOfFollowers = get_transient('cfTwitterFollowers');
  
    // cache version does not exist or expired
    if (false === $numberOfFollowers) {
        // getting new auth bearer only if we don't have one
        if(!$token) {
            // preparing credentials
            $credentials = $consumerKey . ':' . $consumerSecret;
            $toSend = base64_encode($credentials);
  
            // http post arguments
            $args = array(
                'method' => 'POST',
                'httpversion' => '1.1',
                'blocking' => true,
                'headers' => array(
                    'Authorization' => 'Basic ' . $toSend,
                    'Content-Type' => 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded;charset=UTF-8'
                ),
                'body' => array( 'grant_type' => 'client_credentials' )
            );
  
            add_filter('https_ssl_verify', '__return_false');
            $response = wp_remote_post('https://api.twitter.com/oauth2/token', $args);
  
            $keys = json_decode(wp_remote_retrieve_body($response));
  
            if($keys) {
                // saving token to wp_options table
                update_option('cfTwitterToken', $keys->access_token);
                $token = $keys->access_token;
            }
        }
        // we have bearer token wether we obtained it from API or from options
        $args = array(
            'httpversion' => '1.1',
            'blocking' => true,
            'headers' => array(
                'Authorization' => "Bearer $token"
            )
        );
  
        add_filter('', '__return_false');
        $api_url = "https://api.twitter.com/1.1/users/show.json?screen_name=$screenName";
        $response = wp_remote_get($api_url, $args);
  
        if (!is_wp_error($response)) {
            $followers = json_decode(wp_remote_retrieve_body($response));
            $numberOfFollowers = $followers->followers_count;
        } else {
            // get old value and break
            $numberOfFollowers = get_option('cfNumberOfFollowers');
            // uncomment below to debug
           die($response->get_error_message());
        }
  
        // cache for an hour
        set_transient('cfTwitterFollowers', $numberOfFollowers, 1*60*60);
        update_option('cfNumberOfFollowers', $numberOfFollowers);
    }
  
    return $numberOfFollowers;
}

Don’t forget to replace wpbeginner with your own Twitter username and API keys with your own API keys.

After that, you can add the following code to your WordPress theme where you want to display the Twitter follower count:

<p>
More than <strong><?php echo getTwitterFollowers(); ?></strong> users follow us on Twitter.
</p>

You can now visit your website and see your Twitter follower count in action.

We hope this article helped you display your social media followers count in WordPress. You may also want to see our complete social media cheat sheet for WordPress or our WordPress SEO guide to get more organic traffic from search engines.

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