Social Crowd

The Social Crowd Plugin grabs the latest counts of your Friends/Fans/Followers etc from your Favorite Social Networks and then displays them on your Blog. The counts that are reported come raw and without styling, so you can make them look and feel like your website. It is the perfect solution to encourage more users to join your network.

Important: This plugin REQUIRES the PHP Curl Module in order to function. Please make sure it is installed.

Supported Networks:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Youtube
• Vimeo

Plugin Usage

Feedburner Update
Google has discontinued all feedburner API’s thus making it impossible to acquire the stats that the Social Crowd plugin had made available previously, so feedburner support has been discontinued…

Google+/LinkedIn Update
Changes on the Google+ and LinkedIn sites periodically break the ability for the plugin to grab the stats from those networks, so as of the 0.9 release support will be discontinued for now, until a better method for grabbing the stats can be established.

Basic Usage

After setting up the options on the ‘Social Crowd Options’ page in the wordpress administrator (setting the Social Networks that you want to collect stats from), you can go to the Widgets manager and enable the ‘Social Crowd’ widget. This widget will automatically display the networks that you have selected on the options page, with some limited customizability, and you are good to go.

Intermediate Usage

After configuring the options as indicated in the ‘basic usage’ above, you can enable the ‘Social Crowd Advanced’ widget in the widget administrator. This widget gives you the ability to specifically select the networks that you want to display in the widget area, and also allows you to customize the text that is displayed with the stats.

Additionally there is a shortcode that allows you to access the stats and output them throughout your posts and pages.
The shortcode is used as follows:

[SC_Stats type=network]

where network is the social network that you want to display stats for ie: ‘facebook’, ‘twitter’, etc… or any of the available stats listed in the ‘Available Stats’ list below. If you do not include a ‘type’ of network in the shortcode it will return your facebook stat count by default.

Advanced (Designer/Developer) Usage

The Social Crowd Plugin provides function calls that you can use throughout your theme files to better promote your or your clients social networks. The function documentation is as follows.

The Social Crowd function you will call is:

SocialCrowd_Stats();

You have two options:

• Calling the function with a specific network:

  1. Place the function wherever you want the data to be displayed.
  2. Call the function with a specific network name (all lowercase):
     • SocialCrowd_Stats(‘facebook’)
     • SocialCrowd_Stats(‘twitter’)
     • SocialCrowd_Stats(‘youtube’)
     • etc…
  3. Function will echo out the requested Network Stats.

• Calling the function without a specific network:

  1. Place the function anywhere you want.
  2. Call the function with no options.
     $stats = SocialCrowd_Stats()
  3. The function will return an array with the stats for all your networks.
  4. the array is an associative array that you can you can access like so:
     • $stats[‘facebook’]
     • $stats[‘twitter’]
     • $stats[‘youtube’]
     • etc…

Available Stats

The available stats are listed in the following order:
Type of statistic (‘keyword’), use the keyowrd in the Social Crowd function to retrieve the desired content.

• Facebook Friend/Like Count
  (‘ facebook ‘) Number of friends or page likes.
• Twitter Follower Count
  (‘ twitter ‘) Number of followers.
• Twitter Friend Count
  (‘ twitterFriends ‘) Number of Friends you have.
• Twitter Statuses Count
  (‘ twitterStatuses ‘) Number of status updates you have sent.
• Twitter Listed Count
  (‘ twitterListed ‘) Number of lists you have been added to.
• Youtube Friend Count
  (‘ youtube ‘) Number of friends on Youtube.
• Youtube Subscriber Count
  (‘ youtubeSubscribers ‘) Number of Youtube subscribers.
• Youtube Viewed Count
  (‘ youtubeViews ‘) Number of videos you have viewed.
• Youtube Uploaded Views Count
  (‘ youtubeUploadViews ‘) Number of views your uploaded videos have had on Youtube.
• Vimeo Friend Count
  (‘ vimeo ‘) Number of friends you have on Vimeo.
• Vimeo Uploads Count
  (‘ vimeoUploads ‘) Number of videos you have uploaded to Vimeo.
• Vimeo Appears In Count
  (‘ vimeoAppearsIn ‘) Number of videos you appear in on Vimeo.
• Vimeo Likes Count
  (‘ vimeoLikes ‘) Number of videos that you have liked on Vimeo.

I hope to expand this list to include your favorites ( just leave me some comments on the plugin homepage ).

A big thanks to DeviantArt’s jwloh for creating the Social.me and Aquaticus Icon Sets that is used in the plugin’s Administrator and Widgets, You can check out his work.

Other icons used with the Widget are:
Elegant Media Icon Set
Picons Icon Set
Social Balloon Icon Set
Socialize Sticker Icon Set