A method for use in Wordpress for getting social share counts and cache them for an hour or specified time.

getShares.php

public function getShares ( $network, $url = false, $cacheTime = 3600 ) {

        if( $url === false )
            $url = ( is_ssl() ? 'https://' : 'http://' ) . $_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"] . $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];

        $transientKey = $network . "_" . sanitize_title( $url );
        
        $transient = get_transient( $transientKey );
        
        if( false !== $transient )
            return $transient;
        
        switch( $network ) {
        
            case 'twitter':
                $apiURL = "http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=";
                $key = "count";
                break;
        
            case 'facebook':
                $apiURL = "https://graph.facebook.com/?id=";
                $key = "shares";
                break;
        
            default:
                return 0;
        
        }
        
        $data = @file_get_contents( $apiURL . $url );
        
        if( false === $data )
            return 0;

        $jsonObj = json_decode( $data );
        
        if( isset( $jsonObj->$key ) ) {
        
            set_transient( $transientKey, $jsonObj->$key, $cacheTime );
            return $jsonObj->$key;
            
        }
        
        set_transient( $transientKey, 0, $cacheTime );
        return 0;

}