Facebook icon not showing retrieved number of likes from my Facebook page.

Hi Danae, thanks for reaching out.

Retrieving your number of likes from your Facebook page requires now approval from Facebook. Please have a look at https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/how-to-create-a-facebook-app/ how to request approval.

Thanks. Yesterday, another social share icon plug-in that I tried showed my facebook likes and shares on my site easily and immediately without having to go through the long process that you refer to.

Thanks for that info, we’d be very interested to know what plugin this is (because as far as we know, Facebook doesn’t allow this anymore). What’s the name of that plugin?

Sassy Social Share.

Ok thank you, we’ll have a closer look at that one.

We have checked the Sassy Social Share plugin. It does not display the number of existing likes that a Facebook page has. This plugin will only display counters for the number of shares/likes that were registered by clicking a share/like button on the website. The counters start at 0 after plugin setup.

Thanks very much for the clarification.

Please check the pic of the floating Sassy icons that I sent you. It’s displaying the share counter total at the top rather than starting at 0. This is the number of shares I had before I activated the plugin.

Ok, I think there is some confusion. Let me try to clarify.

There are two entirely separate things:

A) Showing the counts of the shares/likes your Facebook page received

and

B) Showing the counts of the shares/likes the page received where the buttons are on (i.e. your blog page).

From the title of this thread it sounds like you ask about A), but I think you now mean B).

Both A) and B) require the set-up of a Facebook app, see https://www.ultimatelysocial.com/how-to-create-a-facebook-app/. However, only A) requires approval from Facebook, B) does not.

Both the Sassy plugin, as well as our free plugin, are using a Facebook app which is included in the plugin itself, so that you don’t have to set it up anymore (so we set up our own Facebook app which you can use). This makes it more convenient, however it has a big drawback: as every Facebook app is rate-limited, and all users of the free plugin use the same app, it can happen that the counts drop back to 0, when the limit of API calls has been reached for that day.

Therefore we give users in our premium plugin the option to set up their own Facebook app (which is quick and easy), so that they don’t have to share it with others, and the limits are not reached, and it always works.

Bottomline: A) requires Facebook approval and is a bit more complicated, but you seem to mean B), so in that case: also with our free plugin you don’t need to set up a Facebook app, but it may hit the limit as it’s shared with others.

Does that make it clearer?