Social share counts are dying: how to remove numbers from your share bar

Social networks are a great tool for promoting blog posts and articles. When a post goes viral, this can lead to a huge spike in visits to the site — but even a steady trickle of traffic from social networks is great!

Many site owners also like to display sharing number on posts, to indicate how many times the post has been shared on various social networks. This is used as a form of social proof, to give an indication of the level of interest the world has shown each particular post.

These numbers are easily manipulated and aren’t a trustworthy indicator of interest, but many advertisers do take them into account when deciding whether to purchase ads on websites — since posts that have been shared a lot are likely to see a corresponding level of traffic. So, being able to display social share counts can have value for site owners.

However, social share counts are dying. Some social networks quietly stopped updating their algorithm, others have closed altogether, still others allow you to share posts on their networks but won’t display how many shares each post receives.

Share counts are losing relevance

Our feeling is that social share counts are losing relevance. If you’re not actively making money out of high share counts, we recommend removing share counts from your site altogether.

Keep the share buttons — you want people to share your posts! But getting rid of the numbers will allow you to use a lighter-weight social share plugin, which may speed your site up.

Even if you keep the same plugin, it will be doing less work, since it won’t have to gather and display the share count numbers on your site.

Share counts are bad for privacy

Most share count functions rely on third-party tools and trackers. What’s more, many pass uniquely identifiable data back to their parent companies. Using various social sharing widgets Facebook has been able to track users across the web who aren’t even logged into their Facebook accounts. This impacts your GDPR compliance, and it might be easiest just to scrap them.

Share counts are bad for performance

Passing swathes of data back and forward between your server and third-party resources obviously takes up processing power that could be better used delivering faster pageviews to your users.

Here’s what popular plugin Social Warfare does to processing time on a busy site. Yes, that’s 7x more processing time than the next-worst plugin. Before you ask, yes — there’s page and object caching here! And it’s not just Social Warfare that has results like this — most plugins that count shares look pretty similar in their usage profiles.

Freeing up those resources for other processes mean faster pageloads and more scalability.

If you’re a blogger who is concerned about losing your social numbers, don’t be! You’ll be in good company — many great blogs like Copyblogger, Nomadic Matt, and Indie Travel Podcast don’t display share counts.

Social networks that have discontinued share counts

LinkedIn

You can still share things on LinkedIn, but there is no share count.

Twitter

If you still have a share count for Twitter shares, it’s not an official count, since Twitter no longer allows tweet counts to be officially tracked. Services like Social Warfare use a third party tool (such as newsharecount.com) to gather the numbers and display them on your page. These third-party tools don’t have access to historical data and only store info for the past seven days.

Another thing to be aware of is that these tools only track shares from the share button on your page, they cannot track retweets. If you’re seeing a higher number of tweets or re-tweets on Twitter than you see on your social share toolbar, this may explain the discrepancy.

StumbleUpon

Stumbleupon shut down at the end of June 2018, and merged with Mix. Mix doesn’t have a share button option, so no share counts are available. We recommend you remove the Stumble button from your site if you still have one!

Google Plus

Like LinkedIn, you can still share things on Google Plus, but there is no share count.

Want to turn off share counts?

You have lots of options! Most sharing plugins (such as Social Warfare and Monarch) allow you to turn off share counts in the settings. If you’re displaying share numbers in more than one area (for example, in a sidebar and also inline at the bottom or top of your post) you may need to change the settings for each area individually. You can also remove Stumbleupon from your share bar in the plugin settings.

If you’d prefer to switch to a new, lighter-weight social sharing solution, and you’re a Performance Foundry hosting client, just send an email to support@performancefoundry.com and we’ll set you up on the share plugin we use here on performancefoundry.com.

Jetpack also has a social sharing option, so if you’re already using one of Jetpack’s many other features, you could switch this one on too. We don’t recommend installing Jetpack just for social shares, though!

How to turn off social share counts in Social Warfare

• In the menu of your WordPress dashboard, click “plugins” and find Social Warfare in the list.
• Click “settings”.
• You should be on the “display” page. The second item is “Share Counts”, where you can toggle share counts on and off. Toggle both the “button counts” and “total counts” to off.
• Click “save changes”.

How to remove Stumbleupon from Social Warfare

• In the menu of your WordPress dashboard, click “plugins” and find Social Warfare in the list.
• Click “settings”.
• You should be on the “display” page. The first item is “Social Networks”, where you can drag and drop share buttons to to activate and inactivate them.
• Move the StumbleUpon icon to the “inactive” box.
• Click “save changes”.

How to turn off social share counts in Monarch

• In the menu of your WordPress dashboard, click “plugins” and find Monarch in the list.
• Click “settings”.
• Click “locations” to see which options are enabled.
• Then, one by one, click on each of the locations in the sidebar. For each, scroll down until you see “Display Share Counts”. Make sure that option is not ticked.
• Click “save changes”.

How to remove Stumbleupon from Monarch

• In the menu of your WordPress dashboard, click “plugins” and find Monarch in the list.
• Click “settings”.
• Click “social follow”. In the “networks” window you’ll see which social networks are connected.
• Hover over the StumbleUpon logo until you see a minus sign. Click it. The line should disappear
• Click “save changes”.

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