Twitter shares button update: there’s a lot of debate going on in the social marketing space regarding the latest decision from Twitter to remove the shares button. As you may know, Twitter shares number has been a valuable source of social stickiness in measuring the quality, relevance and shareable level of your content.
Although, there are arguments for and against this 1) Twitter share counts used to be a form of “social proof” in that your content is valuable. A form of self-vanity in a sense, it was measure by bloggers, companies and digital marketing efforts in seeing how well a piece of content did. 2) Some argue that, not all analytics data, such as Twitter share counts have to provide a ROI. Having said that, the actual relevance of the content matters more than the actual Twitter counts.
There are other sides of the arguments for and against Twitter shares button changes. For now, Twitter confirmed that the share button is no longer available due to a core change in their development framework, relating to their API. At the same time, Twitter mentioned that, their counts were not that accurate in the first place. If that’s the case, why have this option in the first place?
Regardless, Twitter has been struggling to come up with a clear and profitable business model. Perhaps removing the Twitter share counts button and introducing that in an Analytics dashboard is the strategy moving forward to getting people to log in more often, having the ability to display more ads, thereby increasing their ad revenue. That will be an interesting step, yet to be seen. We’ll be looking forward to seeing what the new direction of Twitter will be and update you accordingly.