What are Social Share Counts?
Social networks play an important role in referring traffic to your website, and keeping track of how your website is performing across social media is more than just an ego boost — it establishes credibility, boosts visitor confidence, helps you better understand your website's traffic, influences advertising revenue, and more. The list goes on and on!
At Toolslite, we understand how important it is to display accurate Share Counts for your content, which is why we work hard to make attractive, easy-to-use tools so you can proudly display those hard-earned shares on your website.
How are Social Share Counts calculated?
The way share counts are calculated varies a bit depending on the social network. Some networks only count the number of unique times a link has been shared, while others include other social actions ('likes', 'shares', even 'comments') in the total. So the best way to interpret the share count number shown is that it represents the most accurate number of quantifiable social actions on the shared URL.
Where do these Share Counts come from?
Toolslite fetches Share Counts using the official Share Count lookup APIs of each social network. This ensures that the Share Counts are always the most accurate, since they are coming directly from the source. It also allows us to retrieve or recover any shares that may have gone 'missing' in the event of a domain switch, URL structure update or move from HTTP to HTTPS.
Toolslite does not store any share count data on our servers. Instead, we fetch that information for you in real time (as described above) and display it nicely for you on the page, so you can see all your hard-earned social media progress in one place.
What are these "missing shares"?
Most social networks tally and store share count data pegged to the URL. This means that if the URL changes in any way, such as a switch from HTTP to HTTPS or a move between domains, you're likely to see your share counts take a visible hit, since the social networks will see these new URLs as being completely different from the previous URLs, and assume they have a whole new set of share count data. Fortunately, we have a solution for this!
When you enter your page or post's URL and click 'Analyze URL', we automatically check for both the HTTP and HTTPS version of the entered URL, no matter what version you entered. We tally up whatever we found in the "with Share Count Recovery" column. Even if you don't recall moving from HTTP to HTTPS, you might be surprised what missing shares we find.
Which Social Networks does this tool currently support?
Social networks play an important role in referring traffic to your website, and keeping track of how your website is performing across social media is more than just an ego boost — it establishes credibility, boosts visitor confidence, helps you better understand your website's traffic, influences advertising revenue, and more. The list goes on and on!
We understand how important it is to display accurate Share Counts for your content, which is why we work hard to make attractive, easy-to-use tools so you can proudly display those hard-earned shares on your website.
Why can't I see results for my Facebook post/page/image/link?
This service is for looking up URLs that would get shared across social networks, like articles, product pages and websites. It does not support retrieving share counts for any links within Facebook or other social networks.
Troubleshooting Facebook Shares
If your Facebook shares seem "incorrect," there are a few possibilities here. Facebook normalizes shares for pages that declare a canonical URL using either the Open Graph URL or canonical URL metatags. This means they aggregate shares across all URLs that share a canonical URL. If the canonical URL is set incorrectly, you may get back limited share data. You can use the Facebook Sharing Debugger tool to get more information about the data Facebook has for a given URL.
