Find out how many social shares a URL has? | Hacker News Reader

Find out how many social shares a URL has?

sharetally.co

38 pointsgrinnick18 comments

http://www.sharedcount.com/ has a couple less services, but much snappier results.

these look suspiciously similar

That's not a coincidence. I took inspiration from that design so that it's many users would instantly know how to use it.

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).

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.

If I plug in a YouTube link will it also tally all of the YouTube link variations for that video? For example, if I put in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE3fmFTtP9g, will it also include the shortened http://youtu.be/wE3fmFTtP9g in the tally?

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...)

Add bit.ly! Good stuff.

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

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!

I just learned some of my blog posts were very popular on "pocket". Maybe I should get an account there.

It won't do you much good, unless you want to keep a list of things to read later. It's not "social".

I get a total activity of "NaN", for my blog. Does that mean it's too popular to count?

No it means I busted something :) What's the link?

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.

Nice site. Great for the egotist in me. Didn't expect 'customer service' :)

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.

http://sharetally.co/4037/

I didn't build this by the way. I just came across it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com