find number of 'likes' inside posts (datalist)

I'm creating a status box that will display a user's status updates (similar to facebook), using a datalist to display the posts by pulling the data from a table called Status, and I'm going to add the ability to 'like' each post, which will send the UserId and StatusId to a different table (StatusLikes) to record 'likes', but can't figure out how to display the number of times that users have 'liked' each post at the bottom of each datalist item? The StatusId in the 'StatusLikes' table will match the StatusId in the 'Status' table that it relates to.
Do I just create some kind of SQL relationship between the two tables and count(StatusId), then display that count into an asp:label (inside the datalist) or add a detailsview inside the datalist to display the count...or something else?
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