Undoubtedly Facebook is the most powerful social network available right now but for many brands and services, having a strong presence in Twitter is equally important and for some of them, it’s even more. Twitter fans/followers are more loyal readers, they provide better conversion rate, share/tweet a lot and their tweet drives referral traffic.
So, every brand tries not only to gain followers but also to have maximum people tweet their articles & links in Twitter. And, when they have success in getting a lot of tweets for an article, they never miss to show it off through Twitter counter. Showing off tweet count for an article makes it look more attractive and attract even more shares and tweets to the article.
But last year, Twitter made a hard decision to remove Twitter Share Counter from its official Twitter button. They even blocked public access to the Twitter API which was providing share count data. So, not even any third-party service can get the tweet-count data of your article.
From what it appears, Twitter removed Twitter counter just to make its Tweet button design more compatible and resilient with the trending FLAT UI design. This was obviously a stupid decision made by Twitter developers team because the share count appearing in Twitter button were increasing engagement and social sharing of website’s articles. Article readers not only judge by the quality of article, if they see a lot of people sharing an article, they also consider it worth sharing and share it on their social media too.
Many strong Twitter influencers spoke against it and fight back but nothing happened till now. So, lets assume that Twitter is not going to provide the tweet-count data back in anytime soon. Now that we don’t have any method fetch get tweet-count data from Twitter API, it’s time to implement some workaround.
This blog post has been shared on @twitter more than 2,000 times. But you wouldn’t know that. #SaveOurShareCounts pic.twitter.com/LH3W79BEab
— John Meese (@JohnRMeese) November 30, 2015
Below, I am providing some workarounds which can help you to get twitter share counter back for your Twitter Tweet button. These workarounds aren’t going to provide the exact tweet-count data of course but they are be very accurate. So, you can use them as Twitter counter alternatives while they are not officially available.
1. Using Gnip Audience API
When twitter first announced this decision or when they revealed the reason behind the change, they said they would shut down all the JSON endpoints which were serving share counts and also that the final steps required to upgrade its technology, the company was faced with a trade-off, and the Twitter share count didn’t cut it. BUT, WHAT THEY DIDN’T REVEAL in either of those posts is that if you want this information directly from Twitter, you’ll have to pay to use their subsidiary, Gnip.
Gnip can still show the real tweet-count data for a URL but the service is paid and depending on your website’s usage, you can be charged anywhere between $300 to $50,000 a month.
If you just need tweet count data of competitors or the pages you visit online, you can use Buzzsumo which has access to Gnip Twitter data. You can even use Buzzsumo Chrome Extension to get live share count of any page you visit.
OpenShareCount is a drop-in replacement for Twitter’s deactivated official share count API which can help you to get your tweet-count back in place. Provided free of charge and with unlimited use, OpenShareCount can count Twitter shares to your article just by singing up for free to the service and replacing the https://cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url= to http://opensharecount.com/count.json?url= in your Tweet button’s code.
3. Using Po.st Sharing Tool
Po.st sharing tool is an impressive service from RadiumOne which provides a variety of social sharing options for websites and blog. The social sharing option includes Sharing Buttons, Floating Sharing Buttons, Dark social sharing, Native Sharing Button, Share Image Button and Newsletter social sharing button. Implementation is easy and for Twitter and other social media buttons, it counts clicks.
So, whenever a person clicks your Twitter button to tweet the article, social sharing count for Tweet button increases. You will be able to track social stats from Po.st dashboard, all at one place.
4. Using TwitCount
TwitCount is another impressive Twitter counter alternative. But, unlike other services who counts click on the tweet button, TwitCount do a much technical job to perform API calls to official Twitter API in order to get your link’s tweet count after you have added its widget on your website and authorize TwitCount app through your Twitter account.
Not only this, it can show profile pic of Twitter users who recently tweeted the article. Very technical tasks have done by TwitCount developers to provide this level of service but they made it’s implementation so easy that everyone can implement it in their website without much technical knowledge.
NewShareCounts is another awesome alternative to Twitter counter. Unlike other apps or services which start collecting tweet-count data after you have set them up in your website, NewShareCounts did its homework so as to provide not only future tweet data but also the historical tweet data for your article or URL.
It can recover your lost Twitter share count data either from the official Twitter button or popular social sharing services like Shareaholic, AddToAny, AddThis and SumoMe. The service is integrated in many WordPress plugins namely – Mashshare, Simple Share Buttons, Social Warfare, Easy Social Share button. It have Joomla plugin and for other platform, you can use it’s custom implementation.
Final Words
Deactivation of Twitter counter really made everyone upset who monitor social influence on blog posts but thanks to these amazing alternatives that they managed to come up with such powerful fixes to this severe problem. Choose your favorite Twitter count alternative from all above-mentioned tools and start using it right now.
Please share your feedback about the article and do comment if you know any other great Twitter share count alternative, we will be more than happy to add it to the list.
