Social Metrics Tracker

The information is retrieved directly from the public APIs that each social network provides. This plugin will make requests to these APIs periodically in order to display the latest possible data.

Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, Google+, XING, and Flattr are available for tracking. By default, not all of the data sources are enabled in order to optimize performance out of the box. You can enable or disable tracking of data from any of these social networks by going to the API Connections Settings page in the plugin configuration area. It is recommended to only turn on the networks where your visitors are actively sharing content in order to conserve server resources when fetching data.

In November of 2015, Twitter officially removed their API which provided share counts of URLS on Twitter. At this time, there is no comparable way to retrieve the number of all-time shares of a URL. Please petition with Twitter to create an API for this!

Only a permalink to each of your posts is sent to other web services. The permalink to the post is the only piece of information required to retrieve the number of shares for that link.

When activating the plugin, all posts are queued for an update; this takes some time to complete. After that, the data is updated every few hours using the WordPress Cron system. When a post is visited, if no update has happened recently then that post is placed in queue for an update. When the WordPress Cron runs, all posts in the queue will be updated. You can configure the TTL (the amount of time to wait between updates) on the options page for the plugin. This method of updating ensures that site visitors do not experience any additional load time due to these data updates.

Absolutely! This plugin was created with large-scale Multisite blog networks in mind.

You can link with your Google Analytics account to import pageview data for posts. This requires a free Google API Developer Key. Note: some users have been having trouble getting Google Analytics set up correctly. This section of the plugin needs to be updated in the future to be more stable.

Ah yes, sometimes you have more than one URL to a post. For example, with or without www or with http:// or https://. There is a tool on the configuration page of the plugin to help you configure the checking of canonical URLs. When there are multiple URLs associated with a post, there will be a new link that appears by each post called "URL Details" on the reporting dashboard which will provide detailed stats.

The main thing that can cause differences in share counts is different URL variants for the same post. For example, http:// or https:// will be a different URL, or the presence or absence of a trailing slash will be a different URL as well. Sometimes social networks are smart and combine counts of canonical URLs, and sometimes they do not combine them. A good tool to figure out the "real" share count is www.SharedCount.com where you can enter a URL and the tool will tell you what the social network APIs are reporting. Try a couple of possible URL variants with that tool and see if you can figure out if maybe there is more than one version of a post URL that has shares. It has also been reported that sometimes social networks will suddenly reduce or reset the number of shares for a given URL. I have not been able to figure out why, but please get in touch if you have any idea why this is happening.

Most Social networks will NOT copy your old share numbers over to your new URLs. However, this plugin has a tool to continue to check and combine the numbers from your old domain name ULRs.

This plugin was created by Ben Cole, as a member of the Chapman University web marketing team. Our use for the plugin is to track posts on social networks to see which stories students, alumni, and faculty are most interested in sharing.