Today marks the day when we return tweet counts to all Social Warfare users.
In addition to that, we’ve also got a number of small improvements to the plugin that we think you’ll love.
Oh, and did you notice we gave our website an overhaul? We’ll talk about that a little bit too.
Twitter Share Counts Returned to All!
Back in November, Twitter decided they were going to kill off the API for counting how many times a web page has been tweeted out. That means that all that lovely social proof that your blog posts and pages had accumulated had been lost.
But we weren’t going to stand by and let that happen.
Since before Twitter finalized the decision, our team went to work trying to find the best way possible to restore share counts to Social Warfare users. It took us a while, but we had to make sure that the method we used was going to be trustworthy and sustainable for our growing user base.
We didn’t want to build an integration that was going to fail after six months when the weight of the data processing became too much for a free service to handle. So we looked around.
Though we were approached by a handful of services offering the integration we needed, we decided to go with Artur Brugeman’s solution, newsharecounts.com.
How to bring back Twitter share counts
With this new integration, Social Warfare users only need to follow these easy steps to bring back their share counts.
- Go to your WordPress admin and navigate to Social Warfare > Tweet Counts.
- Click on the button to navigate to newsharecounts.com
- From newsharecounts.com input your domain name and click the “Sign in with Twitter” button
- Head back to your WordPress admin tab and flip the Activate Twitter Shares switch to ON.
- Save your changes and you’re all set!
You can now rest assured your share counts will return and begin counting as soon as new shares begin to accumulate. It may take a few days for everything to catch up and sync, but they will return.
And they’ll be even better than before.
Better than before? What do you mean?
Well, for those out there who like to dig a little bit deeper into the mechanics of how the counts are tallied, you’ll love this.
Previously, the old Twitter API was inconsistent and contained some flaws in the way it calculated shares. One of the flaws was how it handled tweets with images in them. Not the Twitter cards (which Social Warfare does add), but an actual uploaded image inside a tweet.
When you would tweet an image along with a URL, in most cases that URL would not get any counts added to it. So you would have to sacrifice the probability of higher engagement for social proof.
Not anymore!
The new share count method is scraping tweets for any/all links and then counting the instances of that link. We’ve tested and confirmed several times that if your links are being tweeted with images as well, you’ll still get the benefit of the tweet counting.
Important Note
The new counting method will only be able to count the previous 7 days worth of tweets. So any tweets your pages have received in the span of time from when Twitter turned them off will not be retrievable. All shares moving forward, however, will get counted.
New Click-to-Tweet Styles
With this version we’ve also made some improvements to how the Click-to-tweet styling options work. You can now see, in real time, what your selected style will look like and be able to interact with it.
Additionally, we’ve added two new styles that we hope you’ll like.
Thunderstruck:
Caught In the middle of a railroad track. I looked round and I knew there was no turning back.Click To TweetLivin’ On A Prayer:
We gotta hold on to what we got. It doesn't make a difference if we make it or not...Click To TweetWe’ve also included a non-styled option for those of you who would like to create your own styles inside your WordPress themes.
Miscellaneous Updates and Fixes
As with any plugin update, it comes with numerous tiny fixes. Some included in today’s update are:
- Button sizing adjustment after WhatsApp introduction
- Fixed HTML encoding issue for page titles
- Changed default of new buttons to OFF
- Fixed an “undefined variable” bug
- Rearranged the order of the Social Warfare Options tabs to make more logical sense
Of course, if you manage to find any bugs or annoyances not already listed in our public issue tracker, please let us know!
New Look for WarfarePlugins.com
In case you didn’t notice, we’ve also made some big upgrades to our website. This has been a few weeks in the making, and we’re very happy with the result so far.
Without boring you with all my crazy, OCD designer details, I’ll just highlight some of the things that informed our decisions for the new design.
Typography
For me, the most important aspect of any website is typography. It doesn’t matter how pretty your pages are if people can’t read them or don’t enjoy the reading experience.
So we’ve taken great care to refine the typographic layout of the entire site.
Homepage
Our previous homepage was performing quite well as far as conversions are concerned. We feel like the narrative of the homepage accomplished exactly what it needed to, and it was converting at a level we were all very pleased with.
So as far as layout goes, we only made some subtle changes. We’ve incorporated some updated styling elements to be consistent with our new style guide, which I’ll talk about next.
Style Guide
Being the branding nut on the team, I wanted to make sure that as our company grows (which it’s doing very rapidly) we could all be on the same page in regards to our visual brand identity.
I’ve taken a page out of the Atomic Design philosophy and implemented a Style Guide page for our internal reference. This way, whenever we’re creating style elements, we have a frame of reference and everyone on our team can be consistent with our brand.
Consistency is key when developing a brand. You want your fans, users and customers to be able to instantly recognize your style so their brain isn’t having to adapt and constantly relearn what they should expect from you.
And if there’s one thing we hope to communicate to you, our users, is that you can expect clear, uncluttered, and unwavering attention to detail and quality. No fluff, just the right stuff to get the job done.
Wrapping This Up
We hope you enjoy the return of your Twitter share counts, updated Click-to-tweet styles and our new design.
If you’re not a Social Warfare user already, there’s never been a greater time to grab the greatest social sharing plugin ever! Get your copy now!
I’m not sure if this is super old news or not, but can Social Warfare still show twitter share counts? Do I need to have the premium version of the plugin to find the place to switch twitter shares to ‘on?’ Thank you! 🙂
Hi, Kimmie! Yes, you will need Social Warfare – Pro to activate Twitter counts.
It’s a good news but according to latest news Google has stop showing G+ Counts.
Good to hear that the Twitter share count is back.
Is it possible to bring twitter counts without plugin?
Great article on the subject.
Hi Jaswinder! Yes, you don’t need our plugin if all you’re looking for is getting your tweet counts back. Simply visit NewShareCounts.com and follow their instructions.
I’m in love with this plugin! It makes my blog posts look so pretty. You guys are awesome 🙂
Glad to hear it Char! Thanks for stopping by! 😀
I still cannot manage the twitter counts. I followed the instruction and wrote to the customer service, but it still has not worked for me.
We’re facing this across a number of sites right now. Probably 10+ sites are unable to connect to the share counter service that we’re using. We’re currently troubleshooting to figure out what must be happening. We’ll get to the bottom of it soon though!
I just switched over to your plug-in and I am glad I did.
I love (!) it.
Woo-hoo! So glad to hear that Ruby! 😀
Social warfare support floating bars or not ? As I’m looking for that one
Yes, Sam– we do! You can see them on this page and our homepage. We also offer side-floating bars if that’s what you meant specifically.
Hey Dustin and Warfare team!
Excellent news!! I now gotta buy this beautiful plugin!
See me in soon!
~ Adeel
Yes!
Hi Dustin!!
Really it’s a great notice! Thanks.
I don’t know why, but in my case it doesn’t work. I activated the tweet count and registered for newsharecounts.com. But, after 48 hours, Tweet counts still in zero.
Can you help me?
Hey Victor! Perhaps this is better taken care of through our support system. Drop us a line with a link to a page where this is happening and we’ll figure it out.
Ok. Thanks Dustin! 🙂
You’re not the only one. I’ve never managed to get it to work either.
way to go guys! going all out for the users as alwasy
Thanks Ashley!
Wow, finally. You guys totally nailed it with this one. I’ve been waiting for this to happen. Thanks to the Social Warfare team. Keep rocking! 🙂
Thanks Daniel! Glad you’re as excited as we are!
Awesome job Social Warfare team!
Thanks Christian!
Hey Dustin and team, this is amazing stuff I could really cry. What awesome news to wake up to, big shout out from London. Keep up the awesome work!
Thanks again Fabrizio! You’ll have to make another awesome video now with the updated Tweet count tab. 😀
Was waiting for this day 🙂 Kudos guys!
Your patience has been rewarded!
This makes me do my happy dance! Thank you for this Dustin!
Haha! Glad to hear it Steph!
Awesome, guys! High-five from Toronto! Thank you so much for your hard work!
You’re welcome Dmitry! 😀
Hi Dustin,
This is good news, but I need to clarify how this works.
It seems that Newsharecounts cannot retrieve shares less than a week old.
So am I right in saying that my viral posts with 1000’s of Twitter shares will never be able to display said social proof?
Or is there a way using your plugin (share recovery?) to retrieve these counts and combine them with Newsharecounts data ?
Actually, no, allow me to clarify. NewShareCounts can retrieve shares up to a week old. That’s as long as the Twitter Search API that we’re accessing will allow. So real time is not a problem, just anything older than 7 days is no longer accessible. Does that make more sense?
This is great news. I’ve updated the plugin and connected newsharecounts. When I tweet existing content, the count does not increment. Will it stay at nothing until they catch up or does that indicate it may not be working?
Hey Gail! As always, our plugin has a timing algorithm that only updates the counts at specific timed intervals. It may take up to an hour after a post is shared for those counts to catch up. This is to avoid unnecesary load time and potentially reaching social network API limits. If you don’t see counts begin to show up after a few hours, do drop us a line.
Sorry, I’m still not quite clear. So if I currently show a post from a year ago with 400 twitter shares, if I upgrade, does my share count start with only those from the past week? Do I have to rebuild my share counts? Thanks.
Hi Suzi! Are you already using Social Warfare?
Yes
Awesome– your counts are officially cached inside of Social Warfare then and you will start with whatever counts you already have as well as any additional counts that have happened in the previous 7 days.
Thank you Dustin!
Will tweet this as soon as my twitter counts reappear.
You’re welcome! Depending on the age of your blog post it could take anywhere from 1hr to 6hrs (for older posts) to update.
Well done guys – much appreciated! Keep up the great work.
Thanks David!
Great job guys. Thanks for staying on top of your game.
Our pleasure JT!
Doing the happy dance here!! Thank you, Dustin, Jason, and Nick! Will be spreading the great news!
Haha! Awesome Robin! Thanks for spreading the word!
I’m glad that I got myself a copy of this awesome plugin!
And so are we. 😀
Happy camper, here! Thanks Dustin, Jason and Nick!
You’re welcome Denise!
This absolutely rocks!
Glad to hear it Michael! 😀