Top 5 social network APIs
Tags: socialmedia, productivity, api, programming
Published: 2023-03-09 14:50:24

Social networks have become an unavoidable part of people's daily lives. We can hardly imagine the modern world without Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. People began to use social networks for business purposes as they became more widely available around the world. Many of the "big" social networks have released their own APIs to give developers greater access to the networks' functionality and the ability to incorporate features into their own apps.

Below, I’ve prepared a list of social network APIs that might be useful for developers. 

**Facebook API** 
![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/xk43tmfaryipzvqz01li.png)

The first API on my list will definitely be the Facebook API. It is not only one of the oldest social media APIs, but also one of the most complex and comprehensive. The greatest advantage of this API is that it is completely free. To get access to this API, you will need to be registered as a developer on Facebook, which can be easily done via your personal Facebook profile.

As for the API functions, Facebook offers a number of SDKs and APIs that developers may use to access its data and enhance the functionality of their applications. The primary method of accessing the platform's data is through the Facebook Graph API, which is an HTTP-based API. You can access pages, post images, query data, create new stories, and do other operations using this API.

Many users may find the Facebook API too complicated, especially the documentation, but if you take some time to explore it properly, you will understand how many options it offers users.

Link to docs: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/ 

**Instagram API** 
![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/xozjdtch5hcr8mvat5le.png)

Instagram became the most popular social network for posting photo and video content in recent years. Instagram is a part of the Facebook company, and they share API specifications and authentication requirements. Instagram Graph API is a set of Facebook Graph API endpoints that allow apps to access data from Instagram Professional accounts (both Business and Creator accounts). This API allows users to manage and publish media objects, discover other businesses, track mentions, analyze valuable metrics, moderate comments, and search hashtags.

This API is also completely free. One of the main advantages is that Instagram is an extremely popular social network, so there is a large community of developers who actively support and help each other solve different issues.

Link to docs: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-api/overview

**Discord API**
![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/tz3dxm8mw8xkwrvgr812.png)

Discord, a platform originally much-loved by the gaming community, now represents a place where different types of people can share their thoughts by doing voice and video chats, creating topic-based channels, and simply "hanging out" in a digital world. The idea of the Discord API is that it enables developers to build bots or extend the functionality of their app using data and services exposed by Discord. 

The feature I personally like in this API is that it supports REST API calls and WebSocket connections. Via WebSocket, users can get real-time data about actions on some Discord channels (members, activities like comments). Via the REST API, users can perform a wider range of actions, including not only streaming data but also getting or changing data about users or channels, for example.

The Discord API is completely free, but users need to get access tokens to make API calls (this can be easily done; check the official docs).       

Link to docs: https://discord.com/developers/docs/intro

**Reddit API**
![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/y9pzxg903zx6eegaff4y.png)

Reddit is a popular social network for discussing a wide range of topics like clothes and pets, politics and finances, crypto and technologies, etc. This API is not as broad in functions as the previous ones, even though it has a number of useful functions. 

The main purpose of the Reddit API is to allow developers to access user-submitted and rated content on the website. Although this API is quite simple and helpful for developers, it has messy official documentation. If you want to use the Reddit API, my advice is to look for documentation in the developers subreddit; it will be much more useful.

All in all, the Reddit API is free and requires only using an access token, and what's more important, it has clear and easily understandable endpoints and queries for making API calls.

Link to docs: https://www.reddit.com/dev/api/ 

**TikTok API** 
![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/5pqyb2qo7wcinme74ail.png)

Last but not least, there is the TikTok API.TikTok gained its popularity almost immediately after it was presented to the public. This API allows you to make REST API calls to get data about TikTok users and videos.Also, it has a WebHooks function (which is similar to WebSocket connections) that, via subscription, notifies users about an event that happens on TikTok using the POST method. 

The disadvantage of this API is its documentation, which, even though it looks very pretty, is quite short and doesn’t give much information about all the API calls users can make.

This API is also free and requires an access token for making API calls.

Link to Docs: https://developers.tiktok.com/doc/tiktok-api-v2-introduction/
 
I hope you enjoyed this post!