The next social network to drop support for share counts on its platform is LinkedIn. And it seems only a handful of people have noticed yet.
We noticed, obviously. But that’s because we have a vested interest in the world of social share counts.
We also have some great friends like Steve from Buzzsumo who also keep a thumb on the pulse of such social network changes as this.
Steve was the first one to mention it to me in an email back in January. His team noticed that they stopped receiving data from the API and began asking around if others were experiencing this as well.
We first thought it was some sort of glitch, hoping the development team was just upgrading the system.
We were wrong.
As of February 15, 2018, we confirmed that share count support was fully dropped.
This comes roughly six months after Google+ dropped share counts, and about two and a half years since Twitter stopped supporting tweet counts.
Despite much outcry from both the developer and content creator community, nothing seems to have deterred or reversed these social network decisions.
And like Google+, LinkedIn doesn’t have an API-friendly platform that would allow third-parties to scrape or search for information such as shared content.
Unlike Twitter, whose public search API made it possible for places like Open Share Count to create a way to remedy the dropped support.
As of now, it doesn’t look like there will be any feasible way of working around this.
LinkedIn has officially killed share counts for its platform, and all the LinkedIn share buttons across the internet.
The good news is that if you’ve been using Social Warfare – Pro, your previous share counts are safely stored in your WordPress database. The counts on the LinkedIn buttons on your previous articles will never disappear unless something happens to your database.
Why are all the social networks killing share counts?
This is a question myself, and many others have been asking. Those of us who understand the power of social proof know that it can be a valuable piece of information for blog posts and web pages.
Studies have shown that seeing share counts on share buttons can:
- Positively affect the perceived authority of a page
- Influence more even more shares
- Increase the level of trust in a website or brand
Although these can be easily gamed or faked, it still stands that they can be seen as positive and influential factors.
And for a social network, having their share button prominent with share counts might also help the network out by:
- Raising awareness of the social network
- Showing that people are actively participating in that network
- Remind someone who hasn’t visited the network for a while to revisit it
So why exactly would any network choose to forgo those perks?
Well, if we took their word, they have offered the following reasons:
- It’s too expensive to update/maintain the technology to keep counting shares
- Current staffing resources need to be allocated elsewhere
- The technology isn’t very accurate to begin with, so it’s not worth keeping around
- People don’t really care about it for the most part
Now, pretty much all of these excuses we’ve heard from companies are BS. While there may be some truth to not having enough resources to maintain them, I think the real reason behind the decision is deeper… and less noble.
Two weeks ago I was speaking at Social Media Marketing World, and as always I found some time to catch up with my friend Syed Balkhi (founder of one of our favorite WordPress plugins, Optin Monster) about the issue. He offered his perspective on why social networks were doing this.
And it was his perspective that really made it click for me.
Think about how these share counts started. The first social share buttons on the internet were created by the social networks themselves. You had to copy their code and paste it into your website.
This gave them full control of what data they gathered from your site. They could then leverage this data for advertisers, partners, or any number of internal analysis.
Well, at that point having those share buttons and maintaining the share count data was a worthwhile expense for the networks, wasn’t it?
Of course.
But then what happened?
People started loading all these different scripts from different networks onto their websites and realized that it was:
- Destroying their page load times (loading way too many scripts)
- The buttons didn’t look good together because they weren’t designed to complement other network share buttons
- The buttons didn’t work 100% as they wanted them to
So along came the developers like us here at Warfare Plugins creating a solution for all the adverse effects of these share buttons.
Social Warfare is the fastest, most powerful sharing plugin available for WordPress. Give it a try today!
What did that mean for the networks?
They no longer got to siphon boatloads of data from your website to their data centers.
And if they don’t get that data, it’s no longer worth it to them to maintain these social share count APIs, giving you the social proof you want.
Hey, we can’t blame them too much—they are businesses after all. They have to make decisions every day to keep their revenue growing so they can keep the lights on, and data centers running.
It doesn’t mean we have to like it though.
Your Thoughts on LinkedIn Share Counts
We’d love to hear your thoughts about LinkedIn removing support for share counts.
Are you outraged? Will you miss them? Does it even matter at all?
Will more social networks continue to join the “no share counts” bandwagon? If so, which one will be next?
Let us know how you feel about this in the comments below!
And also, be sure to share this out to all your networks (yes, even LinkedIn) because, apparently, not many people know about this yet.
Simple thought here. If you store the counters for LinkedIn in the WordPress database as you’ve mentioned, why not do what other plugins are doing and store the click count in the database – use the initial value and then increment by one for each successful share ? Would be very simple to do. I think this should be part of the pro offering as you’ve done for Twitter.
We’ve considered this, Mark. And we’ve also tossed around multiple methodologies that would help avoid gamification or “faking” the counts. If it’s strictly clicks, one person could sit there and click the buttons all day long without actually sharing the article a single time, and “fluff” their numbers–which would not be something we’re willing to allow.
We’re still considering other ideas, but there are many other things our users are asking for as a higher priority.
Wow, it’s amazing how little attention I pay to share counts. I didn’t notice until I saw the pin on Pinterest. 😅
Still, it’s good to know and I’m thankful for the information.
Thank you, Dustin! 😃
You’re very welcome, Jonathan! And it’s probably a good thing you’re not paying attention to share counts. lol
Syed is so dang smart! And I had never thought about how they were siphoning data from our sites! Seriously though, it’s an anit-social move. And a real shame given that LinkedIn were starting to do some good things. It’s not my major share source but still a decent one and now we have to make the decision to cut them from our share buttons eventually… ie we can keep it there for the old posts but not worth it for new ones. Thanks for the update Dustin, I totally hadn’t noticed!
Yes, Syed is a genius.
Also, if you’ve got Social Warfare’s button click tracking on, you can head into Google Analytics and see if people are even clicking your LinkedIn buttons. I found that only a small fraction of people were on my sites, so it was an easy decision to nix it. Oddly enough, however, Google+ is still a highly clicked share button on my personal blog, so I can’t quite get rid of that one yet. 😂
Disappointing to see so many big companies just ditch things like this without consultation. Sure, they have to keep the lights on, but let’s face it, this ain’t making the difference.
As a former developer, I cannot imagine this is really a big deal for them. They are storing all this data anyway about each post, so it is a little more overhead on top of all the “free” services they are giving us anyway. Not quite sure why you would choose to delete it – with the result that you just piss people off.
Reminds me a friend of mine who works at an “unnamed” bank here in Switzerland that had the same kind of idea. Save money – by “deleting” most of the perks they give ALL their employees (coffee, money for the gym etc). Result – piss off ALL your employees in one foul swoop. Savings? A few million (ie. chump change for a big bank).
Go figure!
Yea, it’s pretty frustrating. To me, it just says that they’ve lost touch with a significant portion of the people who use their service.
I’m not sure how I feel, as it seems to be happening more and more as you pointed out. I always have felt that as social proof, there is value behind those numbers. But with all these different platforms doing this, and doing that, well, I can’t say I will lose any sleep over it.
But I do love the fact that when Syed and yourself get together and decipher the method behind their madness, that is awesome and I’m so glad you shared those thoughts. Makes total sense 🙂
And btw, yes, shared, and on LinkedIn 😀
Haha! Thanks, Bob! I can’t take much credit as Syed’s wisdom is well beyond mine. He already had this figured out. lol