It’s been confirmed that as of 20th November Twitter are officially removing the ability for any publisher to display the all time social share counts of any URL using the current method.
You can read the official statement from Twitter here about why they are removing counts: https://blog.twitter.com/2015/hard-decisions-for-a-sustainable-platform
This information was provided for free and tools like ours were able to collect and display this data for reporting purposes. Losing this data is not just limited to coveragebook.com. Many of the tools that use this data will no longer be able to show twitter share counts.
e.g. The widgets used on many blogs / publisher sites will no longer show twitter share counts post this change.
How does this impact coveragebook.com?
As of the 20th November 2015 we’ll no longer be able to gather twitter share counts for coverage added after this time.
What will happen to Twitter share count data in my existing reports?
We’ve already built in a number of measures to help make this loss of twitter share counts from 20th November 2015 a little easier.
If you decide to use our feature “refresh social metrics” on any report we will ensure any historical tweet counts are retained in your report.
What can we do about it?
Since learning of this inevitable change we’ve been busy talking with gnip (the only official commercial provider of Twitter data) and testing potential solutions using the various streams of data that are available for purchase. We’ve left no stone unturned.
Unfortunately none of the paid data streams provided by gnip are a direct equivalent to the simple social share count that’s been in place up until now.
We are aware of other tools that are attempting to retain some of the Twitter data. But as we understand it they will only be providing snapshots of the first few days worth of shares. Rather than the full historical share count that we know has been provided up until now. This is due to the sheer complexity of having to pull back, store & filter through thousands upon thousands of tweets. In short we’d have to build a tool as complex as coveragebook.com just to deal with getting limited share counts back.
We’re a small passionate team of 6 with big ideas on how workflow in PR can be improved. We’re in this for the long haul. We love what we do and losing this data point has led to a lot of reflection on the strategy for our product.
After weeks of consideration we’ve decided that the time needed to build a somewhat limited alternative would mean all work on other features would have to be delayed. The list of improvements we are working on is endless but includes… — The ability to merge books for annual reports — Launching our next version of automated image capture software that significantly reduces ad-pop ups and cookie messages — Improved formatting options
– Launching our next wave of improvements to our own Google Chrome Extension
– Support for multi-page PDF uploading — More flexibility in adding your own custom metrics
Product strategy aside I can only come back to to the facts. Even if we did push ahead with building a solution to retain some twitter share counts the costs to pull back this data would mean we’d be forced to raise prices considerably.
To give you some idea the costs to retain this data point would amount to more than any other feature of our product. Something we felt was not acceptable for the loss of this one single data point. Again our mission has always been to provide an affordable self-service solution to PR teams.
Will you ever support twitter share data?
We are continuing to explore solutions to support Twitter impact in some way. Our current thinking is if we were to do that we’d want to significantly enhance the data you receive back from us. e.g. Give more information on who shared coverage. Rather than a simple count. We will share more here as it comes.
