Why are the counts so different?

Hello there!

It doesn’t matter what kind of share button is used to share a post. All shares are the same once they reach the social networks, as long as the post URL shared is always the same… on that note:

The main thing that can cause differences in share counts is different URL variants for the same post. For example, all of these URLs could represent the same blog post:

• https://www.example.com/my-post
• https://www.example.com/my-post
• https://example.com/my-post
• https://example.com/my-post
• https://example.com/my-post/
• https://www.example.com/my-post?foo=abc
• https://www.example.com/?p=45

Sometimes social networks are smart and combine counts of similar (canonical) URLs, and sometimes they do not combine them.

A good tool to figure out the “real” share count is https://www.sharedcount.com/ where you can enter a URL and the tool will tell you what the social network APIs are reporting. Try a couple of possible URL variants with that tool and see if you can figure out if maybe there is more than one version of a post URL that has shares. I’ve found that users manage to share variations of URLs even when other version aren’t promoted anywhere.

With the SMT plugin, you can configure it to check multiple versions of URLs and combine the share counts. Under Configuration > Advanced URL / Domain Setup there are some options which can help you capture more versions of your post URLs.

There’s also an advanced feature which lets you set additional URLs to track using custom post fields (but I don’t recommend that unless you’re really comfortable working with code and understand what is happening under the hood of the SMT plugin).

Hope this info is helpful! Let me know if you discover any fascinating patterns with the share counts. It’s been interesting to slowly figure out these strange quirks of the social networks.

Thanks for that detailed explanation.

I took my most popular article and tried 8 variations of its url, considering that I migrated to https after it had already been published. Using SharedCount, I can see that:

• Facebook cares about trailing forward slashes, which my site has always used, but apparently some share buttons have ignored
• Twitter isn’t protocol-agnostic
• Pinterest views every url uniquely (annoyingly)

However, aside from Facebook, all the results reported are drastically lower than what ShareThis is currently showing in my sidebar:

On SharedCount:

• LinkedIn has 61, but ShareThis counts 899.
• Twitter has 321, but ShareThis counts over 29K (which sounds right based on Twitter notifications)
• StumbleUpon has 0 (for all url variations), while your plugin correctly finds over 200K.

When I said ‘wildly different’ regarding SMT, it was because some of the results reported were lower than what ShareThis was reporting while others were significantly higher. But if SMT simply relays the networks’ numbers, which is understandable, there’s something else going on here. Another example- if I try Mashable’s homepage on SharedCount, it clocks in with 0 LinkedIn Shares and 0 StumbleUpon thumbs up, which is clearly wrong.

SMT does indeed just relay numbers directly from the social network API endpoints (it does not use sharedcount.com).

I would believe that there could be something else going on. I have heard of some cases where people had really popular posts (with numbers correctly reported) and then suddenly one day the counts that were being reported by the social networks just changed or reset. No idea how or why.

Since you mentioned Twitter specifically for one of your posts…. can you check some URL variations one more time directly with this Twitter API and see if you can find the missing shares?

API Endpoint:

https://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=https://mashable.com

If you can find the 29K shares with with that API directly from Twitter, then it’s just a matter of telling the SMT plugin to check the right URL to collect the shares. But if they aren’t being reported by that API, then there must be something else going on. Or ShareThis must get its data from somewhere else other than this API.

Also, here are the endpoints for LinkedIn and StumbleUpon if you are interested:

https://www.linkedin.com/countserv/count/share?format=json&url=https://www.mashable.com/

https://www.stumbleupon.com/services/1.01/badge.getinfo?url=https://www.mashable.com/

No, the 29K isn’t showing up there:

https://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=https://jobmob.co.il/blog/beautiful-resume-ideas-that-work

But it wouldn’t put the onus only on ShareThis. The article has definitely been retweeted more than 321 times.

The LinkedIn API endpoint just gives 0s, but the SU one doesn’t:

https://www.stumbleupon.com/services/1.01/badge.getinfo?url=https://jobmob.co.il/blog/beautiful-resume-ideas-that-work/

Yet, SharedCount still shows a 0 for SU, so that must be a bug on their end.

Thanks for the help, Ben.