Due to recent updates Facebook’s API, millions of websites lost their Facebook actions’ values. For some, this was a business breaker. Popular services like SharedCount and ShareTally are shutting down and social media share count disappears.

In fact, if you Google “Share Count” you’ll find a graveyard of websites that no longer work properly.

What happened to share count services?

Well, it’s kind of a trend. Back in October 2015, Twitter decided to shut down its shares count API. After Gnip’s acquisition, it made sense to them to explore monetization opportunities.

Recently, Facebook made a similar move and imposed greater limitations on their API access. That said, it became quite impossible to retrieve likes, comments, and shares at scale. And by scale, I mean doing so for thousands of websites per hour.

There was another backlash, though. Overnight, several social share plugins also lost their ability to count Facebook interactions.

Why does this matter?

Content creators, small bloggers or enterprises, rely on social proof to streamline their content. It’s an old classic for Social Marketing. If your numbers are high, your content is probably popular and interesting to your audience.

With this change, we’ve seen websites losing 70%-80% of their social interactions. This was happening particularly when using affected plugins and third-party APIs.

How do I get my URL shares count back, then?

Ah, the good news (I hope you were expecting this).

We’ve just (re)launched our shares count service: SharesCount.

SharesCount will help you get the shares count from a specific URL, over and over again. It’s not an API service but it does the job for individual URLs.

It’s free and doesn’t need any registration whatsoever. We hope it helps, but be aware that the service is in Beta.

What about share buttons and social plugins?

Good news. GetSocial’s tools weren’t affected as we use a different approach to collect information. And we assure you that we’ll get your share count back.

That said, if you’re looking for the best looking social tools on the market, you can do so for free. Over 120.000 websites use GetSocial and the reviews are a joy to hear.

Here’s how you can sign-up:

• • Go to our social tools page

• • Click on the big orange button

• Enter your website URL, email, and password

After you create an account, we have a lot of tutorials to help you install:

• • WordPress

• • Shopify

• • Blogger

• • Weebly

• • Magento

• • Tumblr

• Other

From there on, I’ll onboard you and make sure the tools are working 100% on your blog or website. If you need any help, contact me through the chat app on our website or through support@getsocial.io.

Kickstart your counters

This change in Facebook’s API was a big headache for many content producers. It’s a hit when you lose your “social medals” overnight, right?

But we got you covered: Let’s get those interactions back, shall we?