twitter shares not displaying
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Hello good folks of WordPress,
I recently made my blog public (two weeks ago), and have been pretty pleased with the response. I’ve gotten over 15,000 page views during this time, and my most popular post has over 2,000 Fb shares. However, the page visits have dropped off significantly in the last few days, but that’s probably due to a lack of promotion on my part.I’ve noticed that for many of my posts (ScienceIsSexy.com) do not have the # of twitter shares displayed anymore. Some of these were fairly high and they just vanished (The Richard Dawkins post – which is the second most recent one – had close to 200).
I feel like the success of my site is somewhat judged by these numbers, so I’m really hoping this issue can be fixed. I have also read about some people’s FB share hit counter restarting for no reason (even if they didn’t change the permalink).
Is there any way I can get these numbers to be displayed again, and should I worry about the same thing happening with FB shares?
Thank you so much for your attention regarding this matter.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi Bobby,
Could you maybe send over a link or two to your blog posts which no longer have the correct share counts? I’ll be happy to take a look at it, but the posts on your first page or so seems to all have pretty high share counts.
And btw, good on you! I’ve always thought science (and indeed general nerdery) should be considered sexy and to see a blog touting such getting so many hits does my nerdy little heart good! ;)
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Thanks so much, amightywp! It’s good to hear you that you are on the side of the nerds!
The problem isn’t just with particular posts. I notice it a lot on the homepage, at scienceissexy.com. This page shows a preview of all the posts and has the share buttons under each. The twitter share count disappears and comes back for some if not all of the posts, and this seems to happen at random. Could it just be my browser?
I looked at the page a half an hour ago and for the three most recent posts, none had a twitter share number. Now I just went to the homepage and I see the number of tweets under the most recent two, but the third post down doesn’t show any tweets. I’m positive that it had quite a bit of tweets too.
I just refreshed the page a final time and saw the tweet count is gone for the most recent post.
Luckily, the Fb share count never changes and I’m really hoping it doesn’t. Is wordpress able to fix this kind of thing?
Thank you so much for your time.
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We are actually in the process of rolling out https communications for the entirety of our site (not just the back end, which has been protected by https for quite a while). It’s looking like there may be an issue with correctly pulling the number of Twitter shares. I have brought it to the attention of the folks who are in charge of this change-over and as soon as I get any additional information I will let you know!
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That is great information! I have one further question though. Let’s say the Facebook share counter has a glitch and it goes back to zero or just stops displaying (I’ve read that this has happened to some wordpress users with very high counts). Wouldn’t you be able to still the this information in the stats, and would you restore the accurate number if so? Thank you for taking the time to address my questions.
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The share number is not something we actually set. The number is provided by Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc’s API. So if something goes awry, usually something along the lines of someone having changed their domain name or blog name and so loses their share count . . . Facebook has no way of knowing that domain2.com was once domain1.com and we have no way of fixing that.
In any case, since we are somewhat at the mercy of those network’s APIs, we cannot restore counts. We can only do all we can to ensure that our feeds are reliable as possible when interfacing with them.
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Sorry for the delayed response. I noticed it was fixed. That’s great. Thank you so much! I really appreciate you taking the time to look into it.
I have one last question that I couldn’t find an answer to, but I think know.
When you change the permalink structure I’ve read that can reset/mess up the share counts for that post. What about if you just alter the post title? Am I completely safe doing this? I just want to add one word in the title so that it is not misleading. Thanks again.
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It is possible to manually modify your post’s slug (the actual address of your post). If you do change the title, you’ll need to make sure that the slug is not automatically updated to reflect the new title (you can just click on the slug right below the title field on the edit page). That should prevent any issues with losing share counts. No matter what though, it can be risky and should be done sparingly!
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