On January 13, TrackMaven announced that it has integrated Twitter share count tracking into its digital marketing analytics platform, in the wake of Twitter removing public access to this data. TrackMaven is the only digital marketing analytics solution providing full insight into Twitter sharing activity for brands and their competitors and influencers.
Wait, Twitter nixed share counts for content? I’ve been living under a rock. What happened?
Effective November 20, 2015, Twitter disabled share count abilities (aka number of shares that once appeared alongside Tweet buttons on webpages). In addition, any third-party developer access to this data will be restricted, making a workaround solution incredibly difficult or expensive.
The short: You can no longer see how many times a particular webpage (namely a blog post) has been shared from your site to Twitter. Generally, these social statistics have served as leading indicators on the effectiveness and reach of a particular piece of content for many brands and digital marketers. Further, it leaves an odd, bleak look to the piece of social share bars that previously looked full and rich.
Remember this?
It now looks like this:
But, why? This is just one of the fundamental changes Twitter will unveil under CEO Jack Dorsey in an attempt to make the company more user friendly and profitable. (Also see: a potential increase from 140 to 10,000 character count limit.) In this instance, the theory is that the cost of developer resources needed to maintain the share count API far outweighed the return of this particular product feature.
The impact? Brands are not happy about it.
For one, Twitter has removed a leading metric marketers use to measure success of blog content. For many brands, Twitter accounts for the majority of social sharing activity on blogs. Removing these numbers leaves a major gap in this area of insight and reporting.
Content is also being shared less frequently on Twitter now, which we know for marketers is the opposite of ideal. Overall though, that makes sense. A person is certainly more inclined to share something when its popularity is clearly visible (see: psychology 101 and/or peer pressure). Without the ability to see the success of a post, people have become less motivated to share it with their own audiences.
An analysis of Twitter’s share of voice compared to other social networking platforms, published by Shareaholic on December 4, claimed an 11 percent decline in shares to Twitter since this feature was disabled on November 20.
Relatively speaking, that’s a significant decline in shares to this particular channel, so it’s no wonder this change has struck a chord with a lot of brands.
Now what?
Without Twitter share data, marketers are missing a critical real-time indicator of their content’s success, nor are they able to make accurate real-time assessments of what’s working and what isn’t. It will be interesting to see how Twitter responds over time to the influx of complaints and distress.
However, with over 320 million users, Twitter is still a massive platform on which to distribute content. While this change by Twitter is detrimental to marketers in many ways, we recommend to keep social share buttons intact on your website and keep an eye on referral traffic from Twitter to measure how this change impacts your business particularly.
Have a thought or comment on all of this? We’d love to hear. Tweet at us, @TrackMaven, or email me personally, becca@trackmaven.com.