Grow Your Followers

Grow your social influence and brand following faster by linking to and encouraging your visitors to follow and connect with your brand across all of your social media channels such as Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp, Facebook, Pinterest, etc. The Social Follow API is free to use with premium upgrades available.

API Designed for Ease

We have optimized for ease of implementation. All API methods are accessible via simple HTTP calls. Most implementations of this API take less than 15 minutes to setup. Simply call the provided URLs with their respective parameters, and you're done.

Getting Started: Authentication

All API endpoints require API authentication credentials to be supplied as query arguments (apikey). To get started, you'll need a free Shareaholic account and Site ID. Signup for an account and then add your site to get your Site ID. The Site ID is your API Key for the Social Follow API.

Example:

...&apikey=8943b7fd64cd8b1770ff5affa9a9437b&...

Note: the apikey used in this document is intended for use as an example only. It is subject to change.

Parameters

Endpoint: https://www.shareaholic.com/v2/follow/

One of either username, app_id or app_id_name is required.

Working Example:

https://www.shareaholic.com/v2/follow/?service_nickname=twitter&username=beyonce&apikey=8943b7fd64cd8b1770ff5affa9a9437b

Give it a try: 🥂  Follow Beyonce on Twitter

Cloud Settings (app_id & app_id_name)

If you prefer not to include the service username in the request, you may store them in your Shareaholic Admin Console and specify a corresponding app_id or app_id_name in your request. The API will automatically lookup the saved username from the cloud settings linked to the API Key for the specified app_id or app_id_name.

You can create App ID's in the Follow Buttons section of the Shareaholic Admin Console under Apps and can lookup the app_id value by clicking "code". App ID value (ex. 12345) is displayed as data-app-id=12345. app_id_name is the name of an In-Page Follow Button instance, with spaces replaced with underscores. For instance: follow_buttons_after_post. Keep in mind that if you change your Follow Buttons instance name, this value will change too!

JSON Response for JavaScript and AJAX

To get a JSON response, simply add the .js extension to the request path. For example:

https://www.shareaholic.com/v2/follow.js?service_nickname=twitter&username=beyonce&apikey=8943b7fd64cd8b1770ff5affa9a9437b

Example success response:

{
   "data":{
      "id":"6552803",
      "type":"follow-request",
      "attributes":{
         "link":"https://twitter.com/intent/follow?screen_name=beyonce"
      }
   },
   "meta":{
      "copyright":"Copyright Shareaholic Inc.",
      "version":"3"
   }
}

Error codes

Example error response:

{
   "errors":[
      {
         "code":"120",
         "source":{
            "pointer":"/data/attributes/username"
         },
         "detail":"Missing or invalid username, app_id or app_id_name. See https://www.shareaholic.com/api/follow/ for usage examples."
      }
   ]
}

Destination Services

Feedback

If you believe you have found a bug, or you’d like to request additional functionality, or you release something using this API, we’d love to hear from you.