Getting Twitter Follower Count without Using API

Here is a quick way to get follower stats for any Twitter user without using the Twitter API. I found this via their Follow button so please don’t consider this a permanent solution.

https://cdn.syndication.twimg.com/widgets/followbutton/info.json?screen_names=konstruktors

which returns something like this:

[
   {
      "following":false,
      "id":"17989067",
      "screen_name":"konstruktors",
      "name":"Kaspars",
      "protected":false,
      "followers_count":664,
      "formatted_followers_count":"664 followers",
      "age_gated":false
   }
]

9 Comments

  1. Ryan Hellyer says:

    Lol, that’s awesome. I actually needed to set this up a few days ago. It was highly annoying having to dick around with authentication just to get something so basic.

  2. Igor says:

    This is more than great :) thanks a lot for this hint

  3. Hardik Shah says:

    FANTASTIC!!! Just Fantastic. You got my code down to just one single line, instead of 12 or 14. Super hack this is :)

  4. HJ says:

    Sheer genius.
    Appreciated.-

  5. noumena says:

    This still works, and is now by far the quickest option for aggregating basic account info due to the new (July 2018) stringent approval process required for creating a twitter dev account.

  6. Pranav says:

    2021 and this thing still works. Awesome!

  7. Poonam says:

    Looks like it no longer works.

    Reason – They no longer provide the ability to display follower count for Follow buttons.

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