There are various way to query the Like count of Facebook pages.
If you just want to want the live stats of a given Facebook page, Quintly provides a live statistics page. Upon entering the FB page name (www.facebook.com/[page-name] becomeswww.quintly.com/facebook-live-statistics/[page-name]), the page displays a live chart updating every couple of seconds.
But you can also query Facebook directly using the FQL API or the Graph API.
Here’s a sample URL for the FQL API
https://api.facebook.com/method/fql.query?query=select %20url,share_count,like_count,comment_count,total_count %20from%20link_stat %20where%20url=%27[my-fb-url]%27
(enter this into the navigation bar. [my-fb-url] is the complete URL starting with “https://”
The result is an XML document in the form
<fql_query_response list="true"> <link_stat> <url>https://www.facebook.com/[page-name]</url> <share_count>[value]</share_count> <like_count>[value]</like_count> <comment_count>[value]</comment_count> <total_count>[value]</total_count> </link_stat> </fql_query_response>
and like_count or total_count will be the values you are looking for.
The Graph has a simpler approach, using simply
http://graph.facebook.com/?id=https://www.facebook.com/%5Bpage-name%5D
Here the result is given as JSON value, and the relevant JSON property is “likes”:
{ "id": "74865038590", ..."likes": 194804, ... }
If you want to query repeatedly, here’s a simple PowerShell solution using FQL:
$wc = New-Object system.Net.WebClient; $response = $wc.downloadString("https://api.facebook.com/method/fql.query?query= select%20%20url,share_count,like_count,comment_count,total_count %20from%20link_stat%20where%20url=%27https://www.facebook.com/[page-name]%27") $xml = [xml] $response $xml.fql_query_response.link_stat