Twitter Share button not functioning or not counting
Twitter Share button not functioning or not counting
Twitter share button not functioning or not counting, that’s not the sign of malfunction of your website. Twitter stopped showing share counts on its official Embeddable Twitter buttons. Additionally discontinued the Twitter API that provided that data to various plugins and third party services that showed the counts.
A quick google search for the above terms, google shows 1,970,000 and 32,800,000 results, now that’s astonishing.
You can estimate the impact this decission from twitter. For years the share counts have acted as a social proof mechanism and an indicative measure of popularity. Normally when people land on a page which has been shared thousands of times, their impression of the site and its contents are different from when they would arrive on a page with just a few shares.
From an analytic point of view nothing is altered. As you are aware that on-site and in-business analytics remain the most important; actual data points with actual value. The tweet count doesn’t always translate into real traffic – or in real revenue and earnings. The count rate has no bearing on the content, quality, but as a social proof factor it had great impact.
The closure of the counts also ensured that petty SEO agent with automated tweets and retweets; simply to get social count up selling fake social proof will also shut down their business.
Closure of this little share count button has sparked much discussion, with industry giants questioning why the micro-blog giant would take such drastic step. However, our developers at CI Corp has some solution; so you can get back the counts. This is a third party fix, via OpenShareCount API
Unless you own technical skill yourself, you may require the assistance of a developer to implement the OpenShareCount solution, our studio here in UAE is offering a special discounted price if you need to bring back your twitter counts. Just shoot us an email.
Please note OpenShareCount API only works once you’ve signed up for the service and added your domain. One domain, one twitter user, if you have multiple sites then you will need multiple accounts.
OpenShareCount can work in two ways. The first method would be to copy the codes provided by OpenShareCount API and paste it into the source of your web site.
The second method is for those who have custom social buttons on their websites. This custom option is to replace Twitter’s decommissioned API URL with OpenShareCount’s API URL. Find the URL to the old Twitter API, https://cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=, and replace it with OpenShareCount’s API URL, http://opensharecount.com/count.json?url=. Pleasde refer to the image below.
