Show HN: The Most-Shared Posts on TechCrunch | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: The Most-Shared Posts on TechCrunch

sharepops.com

38 pointserans7 comments

I wonder what percentage of those shares aren't completely generic, how many actually add anything?

As a relatively late adopter of "social", I was disappointed to find that the vast majority of sharing seems to be raw repeating. No opinion or contribution, just a contextless spray of links - bookmark broadcasting.

It would be interesting to see how the level of contribution when sharing varies by site/topic.

We've been analysing sharing patterns for a while. We tend to see that Twitter shares correlate too much with the amount of posts per day which may indicate its more bot driven.

FB Likes and +1 are much harder to fake and seems to correlate more with actual human traffic.

From our experience +1 tends to be factored into Google search results so there is direct value in having +1 on your site and having your visitors who like the content click on it (not to mention it gets circulated inside Google Plus itself).

We are working to add more sites as we go along and we would be happy to share some information about patterns across sites and topics.

I don't think your Facebook data is right. You're using the "total" count, which includes likes and comments, rather than just shares. While this does measure engagement, it isn't a measure of shares, which is what the data is marketed as. For example, you show 28k likes for the #1 story, but Facebook's data[1] says this:

    share_count: 7023
    like_count: 14341
    comment_count: 7328
    total_count: 28692

[1] http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?format=json&metho...

Is it possible to get the most-shared data without scraping every TechCrunch post ever?

The data might be useful for a project I'm working on. :)

Not surprised that James Altucher wrote the most shared post ever on TechCrunch, excellent writer. Very useful tool, thanks for sharing it.

Not to discredit Altucher, but I'd be willing to bet the fact the title starts with "10 reasons..." helped to some degree.

Incidentally, I find hard to take seriously an article that enumerates things these days; too many blogs are doing this for the sake of getting page views (which works, but the resulting quality is often questionable, I'm looking at you Business Insider and Mashable)

Thanks for the vote of confidence. We think its a great tool too. There is much to wait for with additional insights that we are thinking about.

Would love to get feedback from the community about which other types of information and analysis they would like to see.

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