Ben Cole

I released an update (v 1.6.2) which will hopefully catch some additional errors that can occur with the Google Plus API. If you’re still having trouble with 1.6.2, let me know if the connection status indicator (in the upper right of the reporting dashboard) shows any connection errors for Google Plus after you’ve let the auto-updater run for some time without performing a manual update.

Fixed in 1.6.2

Hello!

I am fairly certain that it works just fine, I just haven’t had the time to officially test and update the version number yet.

Pull request is now submitted on github.

I do believe that on Facebook they count all of these, and they all raise the total count by one:

• Sharing a URL (by copy/pasting the URL onto a timeline or by clicking a “Share” button)
• Clicking “Like” on that URL that has been shared
• Posting a comment on the URL that has been shared

Hello,

Yes you can write custom queries that use the plugin data. All data is stored as custom meta fields on each post, so you can use a WP Meta Query to query based on the data.

You can see a list of the available meta fields on the Github readme page here: https://github.com/chapmanu/wp-social-metrics-tracker

So for example, a meta query to show posts with more than 5 shares might look like this:

$args = array(
	'post_type'  => 'post',
	'meta_key'   => 'socialcount_total',
	'orderby'    => 'meta_value_num',
	'order'      => 'DESC',
	'meta_query' => array(
		array(
			'key'     => 'socialcount_total',
			'value'   => 5,
			'compare' => '>',
		),
	),
);
$query = new WP_Query( $args );

Edit: Looks like we posted at exactly the same time. Hope this info is helpful though in case anyone finds this in the future!

Hello!

Twitter is indeed removing their API which provides URL share counts. Unfortunately, the SMT plugin relies on that API and when Twitter disables it there will be no way to count Twitter shares with this plugin. Nobody knows when Twitter will disable the API, but supposedly it will happen sometime in October.

I haven’t heard of an alternative option to find out the number of Twitter shares, but if anyone knows of a way to do so please let me know so that this plugin can be updated! Otherwise Twitter will have to be removed from the SMT plugin =(

Here is some more information from SharedCount, a similar service that also relies on this Twitter API: https://www.sharedcount.com/notes/twitter_api_shutdown.php

Hello! I am just seeing this now…. I don’t have time to fix this right away, but I’ve documented the issue and added it to the plugins to-do list here:

https://github.com/chapmanu/wp-social-metrics-tracker/issues/81

There is not currently a way to get the individual numbers for just “shares” or “likes” or “comments” from Facebook. There used to be a way, but it seems that Facebook removed that functionality in their new API.

If anyone knows how to accurately retrieve the individual numbers from the API please let me know.

Hello!

If I understand correctly, it sounds like you have a Page with some sub-posts and you want this plugin to fetch data for all the URLs to all of the sub-posts but add the numbers all to the parent Page and pretend that the shares came from that Page.

If so… you will have to add some custom meta fields to the parent Page which you want to receive the metrics. For each additional URL, you need to add another entry. Here’s an example of how to do this with PHP code:

$post_id = 10; // The ID of the parent Page we want to attribute the numbers to

add_post_meta($post_id, 'socialcount_url_data', 'https://www.example.com/alt-url-1');
add_post_meta($post_id, 'socialcount_url_data', 'https://www.example.com/alt-url-2');
add_post_meta($post_id, 'socialcount_url_data', 'https://www.example.com/alt-url-3');

// Important: Make sure this code only runs once so as not to keep adding endless URLs to track.

If you were to run the code above, the plugin would then fetch data for all three alt-urls and attribute the scores to the page with $post_id.

However, you don’t have to do this with code and you don’t need any plugins either. On an individual post or page, there is a section built into wordpress called “Custom Fields” which you can use to set these values.

More info can be found in the readme here: https://github.com/chapmanu/wp-social-metrics-tracker#setting-alternate-urls

Hope this helps!

Oh yes, I forgot to add the colors. Thanks for providing the color codes!

I’ve added the colors and released version 1.6.1

Xing, Flattr, and Reddit have all now been added to this plugin as of version 1.6.0. I was able to reference the Shariff source code to see how those APIs needed to be configured.

Hi Kevin,

Thanks for the idea! This is definitely currently on my list of things to implement.

My goal is to be able to get it so that the popular posts get updated super frequently, and the stale posts get updated as little as possible. It is definitely a common pattern to have new posts be popular and old posts be stale, but once in a while there are old posts that get picked up and become popular for a short time, so I am working on thinking of a system which can account for that s well.

Realistically it could be a few months before I am able to implement this. But it is high on the list of priorities!

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/

Hello,

I will see if I can add this into a future version. I’ll have to change some things to allow “days” to be used as a time range because right now it only allows “one month” as the smallest time unit. Not too hard to change, but not a fast small tweak either.

Thanks for the suggestion!