Powershell GetFollowedCount returns 0

Question

Attempting to use PowerShell to obtain some social metrics from our SharePoint farm. One metric I wanted to get was the average number of sites users are following. The following script runs without errors, but the GetFollowedCount for each user returns 0 sites, even if they are following many.

$site = Get-SPSite https://mysite.server.com
$servContext = Get-SPServiceContext($site)
$profileMgr = New-Object Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileManager($servContext)
$typeSite = [Microsoft.Office.Server.Social.SPSocialActorTypes]::Sites
$profiles = $profileMgr.GetEnumerator()
$count = 0
$siteFollows = 0
foreach ($person in $profiles)
{
    if($person.PersonalSite.Url)
    {
        $followMgr = New-Object Microsoft.Office.Server.Social.SPSocialFollowingManager($person)
        $count++
        $thisSiteFollows = $followMgr.GetFollowedCount($typeSite)
        $siteFollows = $siteFollows+$thisSiteFollows
        Write-Host "Sites Followed by " $person.AccountName ": " $thisSiteFollows
    }
}
$averageSites = $siteFollows/$count
Write-Host "Average Sites Followed: " $averageSites

Need help figuring out what it is I'm missing. Thanks.

Answer 1

It's a permissions issue. If you run the script under the farm admin account, it works as expected. To fix the script, you have to run it within a [Microsoft.Sharepoint.SPSecurity]::RunWithElevatedPrivileges block:

[Microsoft.Sharepoint.SPSecurity]::RunWithElevatedPrivileges({
  #script goes here
})