If you logged in to your blog this morning you probably noticed a massive drop in your share count. Suddenly your Twitter stats are reporting zero shares. It’s not a glitch, they aren’t coming back. Twitter have killed the ability to view how many times your web pages have been shared on their site.
Why Have Twitter Killed Share Counts?
I was prepared for today’s sharecopolypse. I read the announcement when Twitter originally made it, but it didn’t really sink in until I read this post on Social Media Today by Andrew Hutchinson. It was his post that inspired today’s vlog.
I may have known it was coming, but it still hurts. It hurts to suddenly see those Twitter shares disappear from my site but could this be a good thing? I’m always looking for the silver lining. Watch my video to find out if and where I found it.
Stats have been something I’ve been obsessing about recently. I just finished a three-part blog series over on Agora Pulse and it’s made me think a lot deeper about my statistics, which ones are important and which aren’t? You can read the series here starting with part 1.
Share counts do matter to me, but they aren’t one of the numbers I use to measure my social media success.
Why Share Count Matters
My share count is a stat I am attached to. Seeing that people are reacting to my content makes me want to create more. It’s an incentive to keep going. Not only is it satisfying to know that people liked my content so much they wanted to share it, but it is also great social proof. When someone lands on one of my most shared articles they will feel confident that it’s good content and read on. They may even be encouraged to share themselves.
Only the Twitter count has disappeared. We can still see how many Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest shares we’ve had. I do wonder will people be less inclined to share on Twitter if they can see no one else is?
How To Find Your Twitter Shares
You can still find tweets that mention your website on Twitter. The easiest way to do this is to paste your website address into the Twitter search box (no need to include http or www). This will pull up all the Tweets sharing links to your site, even if the link is shortened.
You can also use a monitoring tool to find them. Here’s three I use:
- AgoraPulse (disclaimer I write for AgoraPulse blog) Monitoring website shares is baked into AgoraPulse’s social media management tool.
- Mention – This tool monitors the web and the social web for mentions of your website.
- Topsy – This is a free tool, it works the same way as Twitter search, but it also filters results. You can choose to view tweets just from influential users.
Finally
Loosing those Twitter share counts is upsetting, disappointing, annoying but it’s just a statistic at the end of the day. Instead of focusing on the number of shares work on creating content that is relevant to your target market and to your customers. Make sure that the people who do share are the ones who count.
What do you think? Why are Twitter killing the share count? Will it make you share less on Twitter? Leave me a comment below.
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