Twitter share counts - what happened?
Oh where oh where have my Twitter shares gone? Oh where oh where can they be?Like most bloggers I have an option for readers to share posts they like (or hate) on social media, including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. The share buttons at the bottom of the posts also indicate how many people have shared a post on each platform. Usually Twitter is the most popular share for my blog, followed by LinkedIn and then Facebook.Wordpress.com is pretty easy to use but it's also glitchy. When I scroll down the page on my blog I notice it often stops showing share counts after the first several posts, although if you click on a specific post the share counts will reappear.So at first when the Twitter counts disappeared a couple weeks ago I figured it was just a WordPress problem and probably a transient one. But after a few days I started to get suspicious and so probed a bit further. Turns out Twitter announced a couple months back that it was removing the share counts. For the life of me I can't figure out why they would do it. All the other social media sites have kept theirs.Search Engine Watch has a good take on this:"So, all this move does is:
- Irritate publishers, bloggers and authors like me who use share counts as a lightweight performance metric
- Stick another two fingers up to developers, who are used to it by now
- Remove Twitter from being relevant, when it comes to social proof"
I've put quite a lot of effort into Twitter over the past five years or so and have a solid following there of over 9500 people. Twitter is easy to use and informative, but this move is a real pain in the neck.My favorite social network is LinkedIn. I'm proudest of the posts that generate the most shares there and am surprised at how many people read the blog on LinkedIn.Anyway, you're still invited to share my blog posts on Twitter. You just won't know if you're the first or 101st to do so, and neither will anyone else.
Image courtesy of olovedog at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
—By healthcare business consultant David E. Williams, president of Health Business Group.