Twitter to Remove Share Counts

This month, Twitter announced that “Twitter share counts will no longer appear alongside Tweet buttons AND third-party direct access to tweet share stats will be curtailed.”

The development has surprised some, confused others and angered many. We are going to take a look to see how this change will affect your business or organization.

According to warfareplugins.com there are various situation and outcomes that you should pay attention to:

• If you’re a blogger, your Tweet button won’t show visitors how many times your latest post (or any post) has been shared – Could lead to fewer shares and less interaction?
• If you’re an online pro who gets paid big bucks for helping promote brands, you’ll lose a primary way of showing advertisers how popular you are with the online masses – Social Proof. That could put a dent in your bank account
• If you’re a third-party app developer, you may be in deep waters – without access to Tweet share counts, your app may lose a critical part of its functionality, and you may lose subscribers

Now the biggest question of all. Why would Twitter do this? Having analytics and stats is how many users determine if their content is relevant to their audience or not. There has been some speculation online about why Twitter is making this move:

• Twitter is looking to make more money.
• Twitter is cutting expenses by no longer hosting free count queries.
• Twitter knows that mobile is how the industry is moving. On smaller screens there isn’t room for share count displays.

Most developers and strategist are outraged by this announcement. How can you show the results of your work to clients or to your boss? How can ROI be determined? Well the online world is a resilient place. Creative minds get together and will come up with a way to work around this issue.

Keep an eye on this for sure! It will be interesting to see where we are at in 6 months down the road.