unique: factor to string

Hi community,

I want to count the occurrence of values within a dataframe. 
data$names is a list of many names. With namelist <- unique(data$names) I get all the existing names. But the result is a factor, not a list of strings. 

I would then like to go trough all the names in a for-loop and count their occurrence. 

How do I make this?

Best regards,
Markus