title: Facebook Graph API Read Followers Count
body: <p>Using the Facebook Graph API or some other means, is there a currently-available way to get a user's follower count? You'd think it would be a simple readable metric field at the <a href="https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/user/" rel="noreferrer">user</a> level, but after hours of searching, I cannot find such a field. </p>
  
  <p>I know Facebook considers the concept of followers to be valid, because they have a working "edge" for it with their web interface, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/user_name/followers" rel="noreferrer">https://www.facebook.com/user_name/followers</a> as well as listing the account on the user's main page (see image example below).</p>
  
  <p>Certainly it seems the capability to read, or at least derive, the followers count existed previously in the form of reading the "subscribers" list for a user, but that's now <a href="https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/v2.6/user/subscribers" rel="noreferrer">obsolete</a>. An alternative method seems to have been to use FQL to query the data. This method is now also <a href="https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/" rel="noreferrer">obsolete</a>. And there are stackoverflow questions about it, a good example is <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16276660/how-to-get-followers-list-from-facebook-account-by-graph-api">here</a>, but they seem to relate to previous capabilities no longer available.</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/gX5vH.jpg" rel="noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/gX5vH.jpg" alt="Example from Facebook user page"></a></p>