Sometimes, the simplest answer is the correct one.
Share counts displayed on your webpage are coming directly from the social network’s API, so if your button shows 0 shares, your page likely just hasn’t been shared yet. (Feel free to get the ball rolling by sharing on your own social media accounts!)
You can use the resources below to check the share count of your page for Facebook and Pinterest. Just replace “YOUR_URL” with the URL of the page that you would like to know the share counts for:
Facebook: http://graph.facebook.com/YOUR_URL
Pinterest: http://api.pinterest.com/v1/urls/count.json?url=YOUR_URL
If your share counts still don’t look accurate, here are some other potential reasons:
The URL was recently updated
Share counts are based on exact URLs, so if you change the URL of a page you will lose the existing share counts for that page.
This includes changing a URL from HTTP protocol to https. However, there is a workaround for recovering share counts in that scenario.
The correct URL is not being shared
Social networks use the canonical tag and the open graph URL tag to determine which URL to share and display share counts for on a particular page.
The social network doesn’t support share counts
If you are wondering why your share buttons aren’t displaying share counts for, say, Twitter, that’s because Twitter doesn’t support share counts. Here is the list of services that does support share counts:
- Delicious
- VK
- Odnoklassniki
Shares on other social networks will not display for individual share counts, nor will they contribute to the share count total for the page.
The share buttons have a share count minimum set
If you are sure that you have shares for a particular URL that are not being displayed, it’s possible that you have a share count minimum set that hasn’t been reached yet.
In your AddThis dashboard, open the tool settings for your share buttons, then select the share counts tab. If you have a high value set under “share count minimum”, it’s possible that the shares for the page have not reached the minimum.
If you still have questions about share counts, feel free to contact our dedicated support team. We are always glad to help!