Share Buttons Tally Incorrect
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I just noticed today that when refreshing pages on my blog, the FB and Twitter counts on the share buttons are hugely inaccurate. I had one blog with over 900 shares and now it shows 27?? Some blogs show no Twitter count at all which is wrong – I can see the shares in Twitter.
What’s going on now? This happened in the past and the correct numbers were never restored. How does this affect my SEO?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi there,
Please provide details like post URLs where you see this happening and/or screenshots for Staff to examine. I’ll tag this thread for their attention. You can use http://snag.gy/ to share screenshots and link to them here. If you use the WordPress.com guide screenshots you can and upload it to your Media Library, and return to this thread to provide the file name so Staff can examine it. -
Hi there,
Can you send me a link to one of the posts where it isn’t showing the correct count? (For example, can point out the post where the shares changed from over 900 or 27?) That will help me investigate this for you.
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I can’t provide before and after screen shots because I didn’t make any. But i have a new problem today – I have no stats whatsoever, despite publishing a short blog today with 86 shares. Here’s the link to my blog but amazingly, I have no visitors today. Go figure. https://heatherclemenceau.wordpress.com/2014/12/05/journeys-end-trinkets-story/
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The stats issue should be corrected now, we had a bit of a backlog with our stats counting. Let me know if you’re still seeing a problem!
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Here’s one – https://heatherclemenceau.wordpress.com/2014/11/16/horse-slaughter-trends-across-borders-google-trends-analysis/
32 Tweets and 2(!) via FB. Usually the converse is true. The last time I looked at this post it had at least 88 FB shares. There are others like this too.
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I should also add that I’ve never changed the titles on these blog posts, so there should be no issue with the counts starting over. I have one blog post with 12,000 hits on FB and for weeks afterwards it showed less than 100 FB shares. Now it’s updated to 1K+, which still isn’t accurate.
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Thanks for the examples. As far as I know these numbers should be back to normal. By “hits on Facebook” do you mean shares? Or likes?
You can check Facebook’s record of shares here:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/share-button
Just put the URL of your post into the URL box. Note that Facebook sees a link starting with http as different than a link starting with https.
The last time I looked at this post it had at least 88 FB shares.
If you’re sure this is true, you should hit up the Facebook support team. We don’t have control over the number that Facebook reports, but I checked your post and it says one share for http and one share for https.
I have one blog post with 12,000 hits on FB and for weeks afterwards it showed less than 100 FB shares.
Can you give me a link to this post so I can take a look?
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This blog now shows 1K+
Yet my highest record stats for one day were 11,000+ and almost completely on this blog post. Therefore, the count really should show 10K+ not 1K+.
There is some issue either with FB, the widget, or the handshaking between FB and WP because I notice a lot of the FB shares on my blogs are completely wrong. Almost like they were wiped clean and have now started all over again.
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Thanks for following up again! I took a look at that post link in Facebook’s database and its showing about 1,300 shares through Facebook:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/share-button
However, these are just counting the number of times someone either pasted the URL to your post into Facebook and published it to their followers or saw your post on Facebook and clicked on the “Share” button to post it to their own Facebook page.
I took a look at your site’s stats, and I do see that particular post had upwards of 11K views:
https://wordpress.com/my-stats/?blog=35025970&day=2014-05-06&unit=1
While many of these views came from Facebook, not all of those who viewed your site shared it on Facebook.
Does that clear things up? Let me know if you have more questions!
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Thanks for your reply Shawna.
Where would they share it if not on Facebook? Why would the views go up to 11,000 on the counter if they weren’t shared on Facebook?
I’m obviously missing something. But nevertheless, I’ve noticed a few more blogs that used to have FB shares in the 200-300 range now showing 0. I don’t know how the count can recede or go backwards – you can’t unshare something back to nothing.
This is the problem I think – whatever Facebook database is being reviewed here is wrong.
TKS
Heather
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Where would they share it if not on Facebook? Why would the views go up to 11,000 on the counter if they weren’t shared on Facebook?
A page view is counted when someone visits your site. If I visit your site, love it, and share a link to my Facebook, you get 1 share and 1 view. If ten of my friends then click on that link and visit your site, but do not share it on their own Facebooks, then you get 10 more views but zero shares. This would be a total of 11 views and 1 share.
Does that clarify things?
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Yes, thanks very much. It doesn’t explain how you can go for 200-300 shares to 0 though. Any ideas?
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Can you give me a link to the post and I can take a look? We get the share numbers straight from Facebook, so if there’s something wrong with them you’ll need to contact them about the miscount. But I can check and make sure we’re not miscalculating things on our end. :)
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This blog had 90+ shares on FB, then a few days ago went back to zero, now’s it accumulating again so it currently has 2.
Horse Slaughter Trends Across Borders – Google Trends Analysis
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I don’t see anything that would be causing this on our end. Facebook is giving us the number two, so if you think there’s an error with that number, you’ll need to contact them.
I do see that this page was visited almost 200 times in the month of November. Is this what you meant?:
Depending on where you’re checking your stats, you may be looking at a monthly count, which would have reset at the start of December.
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I’m looking at the number in the Facebook box at the bottom of the blog post – the same place where the Twitter, Linkedin and Google+ stats are located. I’ve never heard of them resetting – indeed most of them don’t. None of the other stats for the other social media platforms ever change. The number was previously 90 something, and it shouldn’t reset.
I’ve also noticed this happening on my non-profit’s WordPress blog.
So how do I contact the Facebook developers?
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It looks like Facebook doesn’t have front-facing support. I have a few more questions for you, but if we can’t figure this out I can ask our developers to take a look.
Did you change the post’s URL or slug? If you change the URL, Facebook sees the new URL as a separate post. That’s the only reason I can think of that your sharing count would reset.
Are you sure the number you originally saw was on this sharing button and was not the views stat like we were talking about before?
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I never change the URLs because I know I will lose my SEO. And the non-profit WordPress site wasn’t even administered by me.
The only counts I’m referring to are the buttons that appear at the bottom of each blog (one of the plugins). The Twitter, LinkedIn, Stumbleupon, Google+, Likes, etc never change and certainly do not go back to 0.
Here’s the non-profit I’m referring to – https://canadianhorsedefencecoalition.wordpress.com/2014/11/08/they-also-served-3/
0 for Facebook. Is never 0.
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Thanks for the follow up! I checked in with a few people and we’re not seeing any issues with this on our end. From everything we’ve reviewed, we’re displaying the numbers that Facebook is giving us. And we don’t have any other reports of Facebook’s counting being off. I spot checked a couple of other sites and they seemed normal.
I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful with this situation, but please let me know if there’s something else I can do for you.
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