It is common in website design to show social property follower counts somewhere on the page, typically in the footer. Usually this is a one-time setup per social platform, but for LinkedIn it is more complicated.
An access token is required which can only be obtained after following the OAuth 2.0 authentication process.
Unfortunately, LinkedIn will only provide access tokens that last 60 days, as mentioned in their FAQ. This does not cause a problem for applications that interact with LinkedIn in the context of the current visitor, however for our situation we need a token without requiring the visitor to log in to LinkedIn.
Sadly, LinkedIn “… do not provide access tokens for applications that are not associated with a particular LinkedIn member”.
A new token can be obtained manually in just a few minutes, so this is merely an inconvenience, but perhaps an unnecessary one. At what point do these few minutes every 60 days add up to enough inconvenience to automate the task?
