Retrieving the Count of Records in an Eloquent Pivot Table in Laravel 5

While migrating this blog from Wolf CMS to Laravel, I needed to write some custom code to re-implement 'tags' functionality for blog posts. In Wolf CMS I relied on the Tagger plugin which has a 'count' field on the tags table like so:

mysql> desc tags;
+

Tags

 Laravel 5  Eloquent  Database