I’m sad to report that Twitter Share Counts are gone. Last week I noticed that the Twitter share counts on my blog stopped moving. I share my new blog posts directly from Cuddle Fairy, so I knew that at the very least, my few clicks should have registered as shares.
You can see my social media share icons above. Each network used to have a little number next to it saying how many times a post has been shared on that particular network. The share counts were increasing for every network except Twitter. So, I contacted my theme for support. I was advised in the forum to uninstall & reinstall my share plugin. I did that. To my horror, all of my twitter share counts – on every post – now say 1. And, they are not increasing from 1.
To make a long story short, Twitter has decided to stop providing API to retrieve the share count. This means that the twitter share button will no longer keep track of shares. Hopefully, you won’t loose all of your Twitter shares like I did. But at the very least, you won’t have any new shares added on. I turned the counter off for my posts beause the stagnant 1 was driving me crazy.
Twitter is my favourite network. Cuddle Fairy’s Twitter has over 8,000 followers. It’s my strongest social network. I’ve written two posts about Twitter – one for beginners & a more advanced post for bloggers & websites.
This is devastating to me. I was proud of the handful of posts that have received hundreds of shares on Twitter. Now, they all look unloved. Plus, I will no longer know how well a post is performing on Twitter. I won’t know if it’s been shared one time or a thousand times. This is true for all bloggers.
I think Twitter made a big mistake. No one is happy about this. I hope that there will be a way around this in the future with a new plugin or something to keep track of shares. That still won’t bring back my share count.
You can read Twitter’s reasoning on their blog– I can’t be bothered to explain it because it’s too annoying. lol
What are your thoughts? x
