On November 20, 2015, Twitter took away share counts on their buttons and from their accessible free metrics. Site owners lost an easy signal of popularity of their posts. Those of us in the web metrics business scrambled to either remove, change, or find alternatives for the data to serve to our customers. And all those share count buttons, on sites across the Web, started looking a tad ugly:
Why did Twitter take away this data?
When asked directly, Twitter's statement about the removal of tweet counts has consistently been:
"The Tweet counts alone did not accurately reflect the impact on Twitter of conversation about the content. They are often more misleading to customers than helpful."
On the whole, I agree with Twitter that tweet counts are not a holistic measurement of actual audience engagement. They aren't the end-all-be-all to showing your brand's success on the channel or for the content you're promoting. Instead, they are part of the puzzle — a piece of engagement.
However, if Twitter were really concerned about false success reports, they would've long ago taken away follower counts, the ultimate social media vanity metric. Or taken strong measures to block automated accounts and follower buying. Not taking action against shallow metrics, while "protecting" users from share counts, makes their statement ring hollow.
OMG, did Twitter put out an alternative?
About a year ago, Twitter acquired Gnip, an enterprise metrics solution. Gnip mostly looks to combine social data and integrate it into a brand's customer reputation management software, making for some pretty powerful intelligence about customers and community members. But since it's focused on an enterprise audience, it's priced out of the reach of most brands. Plus, the fact that it's served via API means brands must have the knowledge and development skills/talent in order to really customize the data.
Since the share count shutdown, Gnip released a beta Engagement API and has promised an upcoming Audience API. This API seems to carry all the data you'd need to put those share counts back together. However, an important note:
"Currently only three metrics are available from the totals endpoint: Favorites, Replies, and Retweets. We are working to make Impressions and Engagements available."
For those of you running to your favorite tools — Gnip's TOS currently forbids the reselling of their data, making it essentially forbidden to integrate into tools, although some companies like Buzzsumo have paid and gotten permission to use the data in their software. The share count removal caused Apple to quietly kill Topsy.
Feel social media's dark side, Twitter
Killing share counts hasn't been without its damage to Twitter as a brand. In his post about brands who's lost and won in Google search, Dr. Pete Meyers notes that Twitter dropped from #6 to #15. That has to hurt their traffic.
However, Twitter also made a deal with Google in order to show tweets directly in Google searches, which means Twitter's brand may not be as damaged as it appears.
Perhaps the biggest ding to Twitter is in their actual activity and sharing articles on their platform. Shareaholic reports sharing on Twitter is down 11% since the change was implemented.
It's hard to sell Twitter as a viable place to invest social media time, energy, and money when there's no easy proof in the pudding. You might have to dig further into your strategy and activities for the answers.
Take back your Twitter metrics!
The bad news: Almost none of these metrics actually replicate or replace the share count metric. Most of them cover only what you tweet, and they don't capture the other places your content's getting shared.
The good news: Some of these are probably better metrics and better goals.
Traffic to your site
Traffic may be an oldie, but it's a goodie. You should probably already be tracking this. And please don't just use Google Analytics' default settings, as they're probably slightly inaccurate.
Instead, make sure you tag what you're sharing on social media and you'll be better able to attribute your hard, hard work to the proper channels. Then you can really figure out if Twitter is the channel for your brand's content (or if you're using it right).
Use shortening services and their counters
Alternatively, especially if you're sharing content not on your own site, you can use share and click counting from various URL shortening services. But this will only count toward individual links you share.
Twitter's own free analytics
No, you won't find the share count here, either. Twitter's backends are pretty limited to specific stats on individual tweets and some audience demographics. It can be especially challenging if you have multiple accounts and are working with a team. There is the ability to download reporting for further Excel wizardry.
Twitter's engagement metric is "the number of engagements (clicks, retweets, replies, follows, and likes) divided by the total number of impressions." While this calculation seems like a good idea, it's not my favorite, given the specific calculation's hard to scale as you grow your audience. You're always going to have more lurkers instead of people engaging with your content, and it's going to take a lot of massaging of metric reporting when you explain how you grew your audience and those numbers went down. Or how the company with 100 followers does way better on Twitter's engagement metric.
TrueSocialMetric's engagement numbers
Now these are engagement metrics that you can scale, grow, and compare. Instead of looking at impressions, TrueSocialMetrics gives conversation, amplification, and applause rates for your social networks. This digs into the type of engagement you're having. For example, your conversation rate for Twitter is calculated by taking how many comments you got and dividing it by how many times you tweeted.
At Moz, we use a combination of TrueSocialMetrics and traffic to report on the success of our social media efforts to our executives. We may use other metrics internally for testing or for other needs, depending on that specific project.
Twitcount
Shortly after the removal of share counts was announced, Twitcount popped up. It works by installing their share counters on your site, where it then can surface historical totals. Twitcount's numbers only start counting the day you install the code and the button to your site. There are limitations, since they use Twitter's API, and these limitations may cause data inaccuracies. I haven't used their solution, but if you have, let us know in the comments how it went!
Buffer's reach and RT metrics
Again, this only counts for your individual tweet's metrics, and Buffer only grabs metrics on tweets sent out via their platform. Buffer's reach metric is similar to what many traditional advertisers and people in public relations are used to, and it is similar to Twitter's general impressions metric. Reach looks at how far your tweet has possibly gone due to size of the retweeter's audience.
Like most analytic tools, you can export the metrics and play with them in Excel. Or you can pay for Buffer's business analytics, which runs between $50–$250/month.
Trending topics and hashtag reports
There are many tools out there where you can track specific trends and hashtags around your brand. At MozCon, we know people are tweeting using #MozCon. But not every brand has a special hashtag, or even knows the hot topics around their brand.
Sprout Social's trends report is unique in that it pulls both the topics and hashtags most associated with your brand and the engagement around those.
Obviously, in last July, #MozCon is hot. But you can also see that we have positive community sentiment around our brand by what else is happening.
Buzzsumo
Our friends at Buzzsumo can be used as a Topsy topic replacement and share counter. They did a great write-up on how to use their tool for keyword research. They are providing share counts from Gnip's data.
Though when I ran some queries on Moz's blog posts, there seemed to be a big gap in their share counts. While we'd expect to see Moz's counts down a bit on the weekends, there would be something there:
I'm unsure if this is Buzzsumo's or Gnip's data issue. It's also possibly that there are limits on the data, especially since Moz has large numbers of followers and gets large amounts of shares on our posts.
Use Fresh Web Explorer's Mention Authority instead
While Fresh Web Explorer's index only covers recent data — the tool's main function being to find recent mentions of keywords around the web a la Google Alerts — it can be helpful if you're running a campaign and relying on instant data no older than a month. Mention Authority does include social data. (Sorry, the full formula involved with creating the score is one of Moz's few trade secrets.) What's nice about this score is that it's very analogous across different disciplines, especially publicity campaigns, and can serve as a holistic alternative.
Embedded tweets for social proof
Stealing this one from our friends at Buffer, but if you're looking to get social proof back for people visiting your post, embedded tweets can work well. This allows others to see that your tweet about the post was successful, perhaps choosing to retweet and share with their audience.
Obviously, this won't capture your goals to hand to a boss. But this will display some success and provide an easy share option for people to retweet your brand.
Predictions for the future of Twitter's share count removal
Twitter will see this as a wash for engagement
With the inclusion of tweets directly in Google search results, it balances out the need for direct social proof. That said, with the recent timeline discussions and other changes, people are watching Twitter for any changes, with many predicting the death of Twitter. (Oh, the irony of trending hashtags when #RIPTwitter is popular.)
Twitter may not relent fully, but it may cheapen the product through Gnip. Alternatively, it may release some kind of "sample" share count metric instead. Serving up share count data on all links certainly costs a lot of money from a technical side. I'm sure this removal decision was reached with a "here's how much money we'll save" attached to it.
Questions about Twitter's direction as a business
For a while, Twitter focused itself on being a breaking news business. At SMX East in 2013, Twitter's Richard Alfonsi spoke about Twitter being in competition with media and journalism and being a second screen while consuming other media.
Lack of share counts, however, make it hard for companies to prove direct value. (Though I'm sure there are many advertisers wanting only lead generation and direct sales from the platform.) Small businesses, who can't easily prove other value, aren't going to see an easy investment in the platform.
Not to mention that issues around harassment have caused problems even celebrities with large followings like Sue Perkins (UK comedian), Joss Whedon (director and producer), Zelda Williams (daughter of Robin Williams), and Anne Wheaton (wife of Wil Wheaton). This garners extremely bad publicity for the company, especially when most were active users of Twitter.
No doubt Twitter shareholders are on edge when stock prices went down and the platform added a net of 0 new users in Q4 of 2015. Is the removal of share counts something in the long list of reasons why Twitter didn't grow in Q4? Twitter has made some big revenue and shipping promises to shareholders in response.
Someone will build a tool to scrape Twitter and sell share counts.
When Google rolled out (not provided), every SEO software company clamored to make tools to get around it. Since Gnip data is so expensive, it's pretty impractical for most companies. The only way to actually build this tool would be to scrape all of Twitter, which has many perils. Companies like Hootsuite, Buffer, and Sprout Social are the best set up to do it more easily, but they may not want to anger Twitter.
What are your predictions for Twitter's future without share counts? Did you use the share counts for your brand, and how did you use them? What will you be using instead?
Fantastic article, Erica. You've set forth the mindset we need to have, looking for the more important metrics we can get, rather than crying over spilled milk.
That being said, we use (and love!) the wonderful and flexible Social Warfare plugin by Warfare Plugins, and they recently were able to restore Twitter share counts to their share buttons.
Thanks, Mark. And great additional suggestion, also great to hear that it's working for you.
There's always more than one way to get the data. Thanks for sharing some actionable tips for making social more trackable, despite the loss of share counts.
Where there's a will, there's a way, and we, marketers, have lots of will. :)
I'm rooting for Twitter to do even worse. They have no one to blame but themselves. After all, they wanted to have their users pay for what used to be free. That's Gnip. So I don't have any respect for them, and I think we see a lot of others don't either. Look at their share price and recent layoffs. They're in trouble and they can't figure out how to gain relevancy.
As a platform, Twitter needs to do a lot of soul-searching. I'm a pretty avid Twitter user, and I often feel the reasons I love it aren't being understood by those at the helm. Community managers have, for a long time, cautioned about relying too much on building your audience on a platform that you don't own -- that another company can change at any moment -- so when changes like this happen or say Facebook algo changes, we can only be so mad because at the end of the day, it's not our site.
Agree. I feel like Twitter has too much "noise" and too many spam accounts. For a few Dollars, you can buy tens of thousands of followers, re-tweets, anything, so no wonder they removed the counter widget.
Also, Twitter advertising is too expensive compared to other social platforms (e.g. Facebook) and have bad CPA and ROI, so I stopped advertising there. ...and due to the high number of spam accounts, I'm not even sure how many real person see the ads.
I've spent a lot of time blocking spammers/harassers on Twitter and curating who I follow. I find it easier to make it work for me than Facebook, but that's just a personal preference.
I haven't done a huge amount of social ads, so I'm interested in hearing about others' experiences.
In my experience at Moz, Twitter has been a more reliable driver of conversions than Facebook at a lower CPA. However, this may be industry specific since a lot of professionals in the digital marketing world generally tend to be more active on Twitter than on Facebook. In my opinion, the targeting options on Twitter are more refined/powerful, so that may help too.
I can't really speak much to how many real users are actually seeing the ads, but I think the same question could be asked of many paid channels (I'm looking at you, Display). Unfortunately, that's just part of the industry we have to work around at the moment.
Based on our tests, 30-50% of GDN is spam generated traffic, so don't even mention that. :-)
It's interesting to hear that you had better CPA on Twitter, but it's really industry specific. I run social ads in the travel industry, targeting customers, and the CPA was notably better with Facebook. Also, Facebook ads had better user engagement than Twitter.
This is certainly a risky move for Twitter and could lose them a ton of engagement and traffic unless they have a really good trick / new features up their sleeve which I highly doubt...
We routinely use the counts share of Twitter to measure the impact of our posts and try to gauge the interest of our readers. Let's try some of the tools you mentioned. Thanks for sharing
Best of luck as you work through what your company needs as a replacement metric!
Great article! You mentioned Twitcount, but you might want to also include: https://newsharecounts.com/ Over 20 popular products already have Twitter shares back, I have them back on all my sites. And this service continues to integrate with more 3rd party companies.
Great suggestion! And one I hadn't heard of. Great to hear that it's working well for your sites.
Love your articles, Erica!
I must say that share counts were a huge indicator of engagement at my company, but the Tweet activity metrics is pretty neat, too.
I'm not sure about the predictions, but allowing tweets to be indexed seems like a big deal to me, and I figure Twitter's going to come up with another thing to show engagement. They must be at something.
I'm not convinced that the Big G will want to release data on tweet indexation, but I agree it's a huge advantage, especially for brands.
I guess we'll just have to sit and wait... :-)
It's great. Good contribution
You know what? I am still not sure if this is a good move or not (for me and my company, not for Twitter) and if I even want to look for alternative ways to get that magic number back.
What I mean is that, ok, removing the count for the Twitter button makes it more difficult to have an immediate feedback on the engagement of a tweet but it also forces you to focus on more meaningful metrics such as actual visits and users behavior.
After all, haven't we (at least, I have...) always lamented the problem with social media marketing being too self-referential? Chasing likes for the sake of likes, re-tweets for the sake of re-tweets without any correlation with real and measurable business results? Well, this move indirectly solves a bit this problem... no?
I agree. Not to mention that what people share does not correlate to what they actually read. I want people to read my content first and foremost. I was chatting traffic numbers recently for my comic book review blog with another marketer who was shocked at how low my traffic is, and my response was that my actual ROI of doing the reviews was getting people to read the books I recommend, which is what the people who actually read my blog do.
we normally focus on facebook, however it seems twitter need more relevance as well
Can you tell me whether twitter will generate effective leads or not?
That sounds like a great question for our q&a forum with more information about your brand, what types of leads you're trying to get, and your general strategy.
I don't success with Twitter. I don't know how to do my business on it. :(
Hi Erica
Great article. You know? For me the problem is that measuring the results we can draw from Twitter neither are as simple nor as reliable as Google.
Hi Carlos,
While I agree that GA makes is really easy to grab metrics, I disagree that it's easier to measure because Google Analytics does sampling instead of giving you exact numbers. And there's been many people (who are much smarter than me about website analytics) who argue that GA numbers can be very off compared to the actuals.
I think the main issue with the loss of the Twitter share counts is the loss of social proof when it comes to asking other people to share your content. A healthy share count was a good indicator of popularity, and a good motivator for people to share.
However, you can restore old share counts to your social sharing buttons in many cases, and not have to start from scratch with zero shares: https://timfelmingham.com/get-twitter-share-counts-back/
Very useful info, thanks for the investigation
I have no idea for this matter because Twitter is not my top-used media for the business. I like Linkedn and Facebook instead! But I can share your post for my friends since they used Twitter!
I'm starting to use twitter as a company and this article will be very helpful to me, thank you very much
Great update. I've been wondering why they haven't all been pulling through recently.
I thought there was no way to keep track of interactions in twitter.
Thank you very much.
Now-a- days all are using the twitter to increase their brand awareness. But your are sharing that success metrics without using Twitter it is workout to increase the traffic.
Share counts were so amazingly useful for analyzing competitors content, empty twitter counters will haunt us for a long time, a lot of websites still keep them, probably hoping that twitter will reconsider. I hope Facebook doesn't plan to hide it's share data, that would be devastating.
Yes, share counts were an easy metric to dig into your competitors and see what they were doing. Luckily there are still a few other things you can use.
Our marketing department was planning a new strategy through Twitter when it was found that he had removed access to share counts. We changed the strategy of measuring and now we are analyzing some of the tools that you propose
Best of luck on working on finding the best metrics!
Social share count is to measure the user interest so it there is no any guarantee to have a better rank with large amount of share. It is obvious for the start up like Fabledeal to have a better share to gain the popularity but it about rank it is not sure.
I am currently working with a small business client who currently does not have a Twitter account. Most of their traffic is coming in through their Facebook account and Google + accounts. I was going to suggest that the client of course use other social media products to improve their marketing efforts. With the decline in popularity of Twitter as explained in this article, should I even suggest that the client add a Twitter account and spend the additional monies to have the traffic monitored? Any suggestions or comments would be greatly appreciated. Thank You!
It really depends on your client's market and audience. With social media, you only want to use networks that you can find or develop market share on. For example, at Moz, we don't use Snapchat because most of our audience is over 25-years-old. Twitter can certainly still make sense for brands -- Moz's Twitter is our biggest and strongest social media following still -- but you have to figure out if your brand's audience is there and what you're going to be communicating or using that channel for.
Thanks for the great article I didn't know that much about how to use the social media sites like Twitter.
That's a great overview of share count alternatives, Erica!
I'd like to comment on the 'Twitter scrape tool that will sell share counts'. Such actions (like scraping _all_ tweets) are explicitly forbidden by Twitter TOS and it's really unlikely that any company, no matter how big or technologically advanced, would ever invest in such a service.
On the other hand, several free TOS-compliant alternatives exist, one being https://twitcount.com that you mentioned, and a couple of others: https://newsharecounts.com (I'm involved with it) and https://opensharecount.com. And for those who base their strategies on Twitter, getting the social proof back with these services may be very well worth it.
Honestly, I know that there is a lot of power in Social Media, however this is a prime example as to why most businesses don't see a solid return from it.
By "solid return," what are you looking for?
cool via social media optimization,
I think social media provides an important role for a website
Awesome lead image!
Is there any chance that twitter will bring baack the metrics?!.
Twitter is only good for personalities
Where media and fans watch out for their posts.
No good for ordinary people
One does not get hits from Twitter.