IN THIS ARTICLE
What are Share Counts?
Share Counts is the official tally of how many times a link has been shared on a social network, according to the social network.
Social networks play an important role in referring traffic to your website, and keeping track of how your website is performing across social media is more than just an ego boost — Share Counts establishes credibility, boosts visitor confidence, helps you better understand your website's traffic, influences advertising revenue, and more. The list goes on and on!
At Shareaholic, we understand how important it is to display accurate Share Counts for your content, which is why we work hard to make attractive, easy-to-use tools so you can proudly display those hard-earned shares on your website.
The share counts displayed on your website are pulling directly from the respective social service’s API.
Who keeps tally and Where do Share Counts come from?
Shareaholic fetches Share Counts using the official Share Count lookup APIs of each social network and it reflects the total shares to that service for the lifetime of that URL. This ensures that the Share Counts are always the most accurate since they are coming directly from the source. It also allows us to retrieve or recover any shares that may have gone 'missing' in the event of a domain switch, URL structure update or move from HTTP to HTTPS.
Shareaholic does not store any share count data on our servers. Instead, we fetch that information for you in real time (as described above) and display it nicely for you on the page, so you can see all your hard-earned social media progress in one place.
Which Social Networks support Share Counts?
- Buffer
- VK (VKontakte)
- Tumblr
- Odnoklassniki (OK)
- Yummly
The following services discontinued their Official Share Count API's, meaning it is no longer possible for any share button service or otherwise to retrieve share counts directly -
- Fancy dropped support for share counts in August 2021
- StumbleUpon was shut down in 2018
- LinkedIn dropped support for share counts on Feb 7th, 2018
- Google+ dropped support for share counts in Sep 2017
- Delicious dropped support for share counts in Jan 2016
- Twitter dropped support for share counts on Nov 20th, 2015
If you haven't already, check out TwitCount as a possible solution for Twitter counts. Their solution works with Shareaholic tools. For any support questions related to TwitCount, please contact them directly.
Better Facebook Share Counts
Calling Facebook’s Graph API for Share Counts with authenticated credentials results in better, more accurate Share Counts. It is not possible to safely make such authenticated requests without a server-side solution. You can setup your Facebook App credentials with either the local Share Count Proxy (WordPress) or the one hosted by Shareaholic.
If your Facebook share counts are behaving erratically, try running Facebook's URL Debugger Tool for the URL and click "scrape again":
Missing Share Counts
Most social networks tally and store share count data pegged to the URL. This means that if you alter the URL in any way, such as a switch from HTTP to HTTPS or a move between domains, you're likely to see your share counts take a visible hit, since the social networks will see these new URLs as being completely different from the previous URLs, and assume they have a whole new set of share count data.
An example of URL alteration:
Say one of your blog posts is titled "10 Ways to Improve your Social Media Standing" and has the URL http://www.mywebsite.com/10-ways-to-improve-your-social-media-standing, but you change the post title to "22 Ways to Improve your Social Media Standing", which in turn changes the URL to http://www.mywebsite.com/22-ways-to-improve-your-social-media-standing. Because the URL has been changed, the share count will start from zero as if this is an entirely new post in the eyes of the Social Networks.
Fortunately, we have a solution to recover counts in such situations, please see -- Share Count Recovery™ service for details.
How can I enable or disable Share Count Settings?
You can easily enable/disable the share count display for a Share Buttons app in the Apps page for your site.
- Log in to Shareaholic.com and select a Site Profile site.
- In the 'Apps' section, select the Share Button you'd like to edit and click Settings.
- In the Share Buttons Settings pop up that appears, the settings for the Counter will appear under the Layout tab. You can choose from the given options to customize the appearance of the Share Counts, or opt to disable them entirely. A live preview of the Counter will be displayed in the right-hand 'Preview' window.
The COUNTER style options available for selection depend on your THEME and SIZE choices. All changes are immediately applied once your settings have been saved.
How can I check Share Counts for a URL
We created a simple tool that you can use to lookup Share Counts for any URL - Share Count lookup tool. It fetches Share Counts from the official Share APIs and displays them neatly in a table. Do check it out.