Re:Find out how many social shares a URL has?
by stevenkovar on Monday October 07, 2013 @09:09PM
(#6512377)
We created a script of our own that did this for the share buttons on http://viralsweep.com/advanced-sweepstakes-guide and the main issue we had was that, depending on the service, you may have to specify whether it's www. or whether there is or is not a / at the end of the URL.
Services like Sharetally are neat because they do the crawling for you, but the numbers still may not be entire accurate; especially if you consider URL shorteners and how various services crawl and report those. Even more confusing is why some services (in particular, g+) seem to over-report the number of shares, only to self-correct later on (by as many as 10-11).
Re:Find out how many social shares a URL has?
by adventured on Tuesday October 08, 2013 @01:46AM
(#6513268)
Have spent several years running services that do a large volume of social share tracking, and the biggest problem I've run into is for eg: Twitter that doesn't have an official API method for the share counts and has a low ceiling on the rate limiting. The url consistency is definitely another big monster in the room.
Re:Find out how many social shares a URL has?
by XaspR8d on Monday October 07, 2013 @08:44PM
(#6512275)
Makes me think how adding link shorteners really compounds the problem. Do these services check if there is a bit.ly version of the URL on all of the social sites? What about multiply-shortened URLs? (presumably that would be a waste, but in the "ideal" solution we could somehow find them all...)
Re:Find out how many social shares a URL has?
by naiyt on Monday October 07, 2013 @07:52PM
(#6512112)
Very cool! The Reddit results don't seem accurate after throwing in one of my sites that have been posted on Reddit a few times. The rest was interesting and enlightening. Thanks!
Re:Find out how many social shares a URL has?
by bradsknutson on Tuesday October 08, 2013 @01:04AM
(#6513159)
Actually yea, it's too popular. I figured out what the issue was, and will have it fixed shortly. Good catch! Didn't mean for this to turn into a QA session...but hey, why not.
Re:Find out how many social shares a URL has?
by bradsknutson on Tuesday October 08, 2013 @01:13AM
(#6513182)
Thanks, and no problem for the "customer service." As with anything, it's difficult to find problems until it gets out there in the wild. Lots of weird stuff crops up that you hadn't accounted for.
Services like Sharetally are neat because they do the crawling for you, but the numbers still may not be entire accurate; especially if you consider URL shorteners and how various services crawl and report those. Even more confusing is why some services (in particular, g+) seem to over-report the number of shares, only to self-correct later on (by as many as 10-11).
I've been doing this stuff for a bit on my personal sites. Interested in how different networks contribute to link popularity.
http://hnfluence.com
http://influentialtimes.com