Twitter Removed Counts From Share Buttons, Here’s What You Can Do About It

We've been getting lots of questions about the disappearance of the numerical count of tweets on story pages. For sites using the tweet button provided by Twitter, here's what that looked like until November 20th:

old Tweet button with counter

On November 20th, the tweet count disappeared and it's not coming back. Why? Twitter shut down that feature.

In truth, the value of this particular feature was always rather limited. It was an overly simplistic metric that showed how many people clicked the Tweet button, but didn't include a count of retweets, likes, or replies which can be much more important in measuring reach and impact of any given story. As Twitter explained in their announcement of the changes:

The Tweet button counts the number of Tweets that have been Tweeted with the exact URL specified in the button. This count does not reflect the impact on Twitter of conversation about your content — it doesn’t count replies, quote Tweets, variants of your URLs, nor does it reflect the fact that some people Tweeting these URLs might have many more followers than others.

In our own work, we have also been trying to reduce the number of third-party scripts that are loaded on any given page in the interest of improving load time and protecting users' privacy.

That said, we know that understanding the reach and impact of stories on social media is increasingly important to the publishers we work with, so here are some ways of digging into Twitter analytics that will give you a much better picture than a simple count of how many times a story has been tweeted.

Better Ways to Measure Impact on Twitter

Twitter search

Copy and paste the url of a story page into the search box on Twitter, and you can see who tweeted the story, when they tweeted it, and how many likes and retweets each tweet got. Twitter search now also lets you filter results to see "top" tweets or a "live" stream of all tweets for a particular search.

For each account that tweeted the story, you can then dig a bit deeper to discover how many followers the account has, how many of those followers you know and whether this is someone you might want to reach out to as you try to build a more engaged base of readers.

If you find someone consistently tweeting your stories, you might want to follow them back, add them to a Twitter list, invite them to subscribe to your newsletter or attend an event or just take a minute to say thanks.

Here's an example of such a Twitter search for a recent story on Frontline.

Topsy Social Search

Topsy provides similar functionality in several languages (again, just copy and paste the URL for your story into their search box). If you really just want a numerical count of tweets it gives you that up front, but it also lets you dive deeper to get real insight into your story's reach and impact. Here's a search for tweets and retweets about the same story from Frontline.

Google Analytics

A tweet about your story is nice, but it's even nicer when people who see the tweet click through to your story page. Google Analytics gives you this kind of data and much more.

For an easy overview of all incoming traffic to your site from Twitter, click Acquisition in the Google Analytics reporting sidebar, then on Social -> Network Referrals. You'll probably see Facebook on top, followed by Twitter, Reddit, etc. Click on Twitter and you'll see a list of shared urls from your website. You can see the number of sessions and pageviews for each URL, and importantly the average session duration which tells you something about how people actually engaged with your story and site.

You can drill down much further by tinkering with the various secondary dimension options to see the geographical location of your page visitors, how many used mobile or desktop browsers and many other dimensions too numerous to cover here.

If you want to look up social network referrals for a specific story, click on Behavior in the Google Analytics reporting sidebar, then Site Content -> All Pages. In the search box, paste in the story URL but only include the part of the URL after your site domain name.

Google Analytics data

For example, if the full URL to your story is:

http://nerds.inn.org/2015/10/27/inn-member-website-review-october-2015/

Paste this into the search box:

/2015/10/27/inn-member-website-review-october-2015/

Hit enter and you'll see the number of pageviews and other traffic data for that story. Click on secondary dimension, and in the dropdown select Social Network. You'll see how many pageviews etc. came from Facebook, Twitter, and any other social sources.

This is Work but It's Important

The above methods give you tons more useful information than the now-defunct simple numerical count. No question some of this is more work, but it can really pay off.

If you know who is reading and sharing your content, you have a chance to more deeply engage with them. And if you know what kind of traffic is coming to which stories from where, you might be able to discern how to better reach different audiences.

It takes time and good judgement to work effectively with the rich data available through these tools, and it can be difficult to fit all this into your other work.

But at the end of the day, it's a lot more useful than a Tweet button.

What are you using to measure your reach and impact on Twitter? Leave a comment and let us know what's worked well for you.

What Should A Nonprofit News Site Look Like?

I had an interesting Twitter conversation this morning and wanted to collect and share some a few more thoughts and some of the side conversations it spawned.

Responding to this tweet by Josh Stearns (of the Dodge Foundation) I recalled some research we've done here at INN (and would love to continue) looking at how nonprofit news sites can better communicate their reliance on member/donor support.

https://twitter.com/jcstearns/status/633640971394240512

Essentially, we've found that it can be very difficult for nonprofit news sites that rely on donations to distinguish themselves and stand out as distinct from for-profit sites that often rely more on advertising. In fact, some preliminary user testing we've done suggests that if nonprofit news sites have advertising AND donation/membership messaging visitors are more likely to assume the organization makes its money primarily through advertising. We have not yet done research with enough sites to definitively confirm this finding or to show that there is a resulting drop-off in donations, but it definitely gives us pause.

Communicating "nonprofitness" (or at least that donations are a significant source of revenue) is crucial if nonprofit news organizations need visitors to understand just how important their donations are to the organization's survival.

https://twitter.com/jcstearns/status/633642599178469376

https://twitter.com/aschweig/status/633646670941556736

https://twitter.com/aschweig/status/633646914622259200

https://twitter.com/aschweig/status/633649183023456256

https://twitter.com/aschweig/status/633649354213998593

https://twitter.com/aschweig/status/633649543314194432

https://twitter.com/aschweig/status/633649673631215616

https://twitter.com/aschweig/status/633650057527472128

https://twitter.com/aschweig/status/633651107659563009

This exchange spawned a number of interesting side conversations. Steve Katz, the publisher of INN member Mother Jones brought their creative director, Ivylise Simones, into the conversation:

https://twitter.com/Steve_Katz/status/633656382294638592

Mother Jones is in a unique position where they rely not only on donations but also print subscriptions and advertising. While not common to many INN members (most are web-only, a handful have a print products, most don't realize a significant amount of revenue from advertising/sponsorship), this is a situation that IS shared by some other nonprofit publications.

https://twitter.com/aschweig/status/633674251027877888

More well-established organizations struggle with adapting to changing conditions without harming the strong brands that they've established over time.

https://twitter.com/Steve_Katz/status/633674984720740353

https://twitter.com/Steve_Katz/status/633675215730446336

https://twitter.com/Steve_Katz/status/633675364779200512

https://twitter.com/Steve_Katz/status/633675522086584321

https://twitter.com/Steve_Katz/status/633675727775264768

https://twitter.com/Steve_Katz/status/633675902505713664

https://twitter.com/Steve_Katz/status/633678000513396737

There's also a lot more to being a nonprofit news organization beyond just asking for money and relying on contributions from your visitors. The most successful organizations think about "membership" not as just a financial transaction, but focus also on involving their community in the editorial process, being responsive, getting out into the community and really providing a valuable public service.

https://twitter.com/aschweig/status/633648645779292160

https://twitter.com/aschweig/status/633651691154313217

And of course there's a lot nonprofit news organizations can learn (and share) from and with the broader nonprofit sector.

https://twitter.com/jcstearns/status/633654355766452224

https://twitter.com/jcstearns/status/633654619432992768

Communicating why your work has value and how the community can get involved are some additional points many donors look at when deciding whether to give. Does your site make this clear to visitors or do they have to go hunting?

https://twitter.com/jcstearns/status/633662222452064256

https://twitter.com/jcstearns/status/633662593673117696

https://twitter.com/jcstearns/status/633663064978685952

https://twitter.com/RunGomez/status/633664342320287745

https://twitter.com/RunGomez/status/633665118459396097

https://twitter.com/RunGomez/status/633665271987744769

https://twitter.com/jcstearns/status/633666074270109697

https://twitter.com/RunGomez/status/633666337697501186

And finally, while the tax status of nonprofit news organizations does distinguish them from their for-profit peers, the tax implications of a donation is far less important to many smaller donors. They care much more about the mission of the organization they're pledging their support to.

https://twitter.com/RunGomez/status/633672223765561344

https://twitter.com/RunGomez/status/633672656563208192

https://twitter.com/jcstearns/status/633673688764841984

https://twitter.com/jcstearns/status/633673898966577152

https://twitter.com/RunGomez/status/633674266244853760

https://twitter.com/aschweig/status/633674753362935808

Should nonprofit news sites look different than their for-profit counterparts? What would they need to do to clearly communicate this to visitors? Leave a comment and let us know what you think!

Largo Project Sites Tweet Like The NY Times With New WordPress Plugin

Last week the New York Times rolled out a new feature to make it easier for readers to share notable quotes to Twitter from their story about auditioning for Saturday Night Live. This generated a fair amount of interest in news design circles.

A new WordPress plugin makes it easy to tweet selected excepts from stories.
A new WordPress plugin makes it easy to tweet selected excepts from stories.

Joshua Benton of Nieman Lab liked what he saw and uncovered a WordPress plugin that does something very similar. After modifying it a bit for use on the Nieman Lab site, Yuri Victor of the Washington Post contributed some additional features and this afternoon I thought I would customize it just a bit further and make it available to all of INN's Largo Project sites.

A quick sidenote: If you're not familiar with Project Largo, it's INN's responsive WordPress framework we've developed to help our members quickly get up and running with top-notch websites powered by WordPress that look great on any device. It's fully open source so even if you're not a member of INN you can grab the code here or get in touch if you would like to learn more.

For the Largo sites that INN hosts, this new tweetable text feature is already active on your site. If you use Largo but host elsewhere you can grab our custom version of the plugin here.

The basic usage is as follows:

Schardt says that [tweetable]finding creative journalists with an awareness of what technologies are available to them is half the battle.[/tweetable] The advancements themselves outpace the average newsroom's awareness and ability, but funding continues to be overwhelmingly aimed at furthering these platforms — while journalists struggle to keep up.

Optionally, you can include an alt tag in the shortcode if you want the text of the tweet to be different than the exact text you're highlighting:

Schardt says that [tweetable alt="This is actually the text that will show up in the tweet."]finding creative journalists with an awareness of what technologies are available to them is half the battle.[/tweetable] The advancements themselves outpace the average newsroom's awareness and ability, but funding continues to be overwhelmingly aimed at furthering these platforms — while journalists struggle to keep up.

You can also add hashtags to the tweet:

Schardt says that [tweetable hashtag="#journalism #publicmedia"]finding creative journalists with an awareness of what technologies are available to them is half the battle.[/tweetable] The advancements themselves outpace the average newsroom's awareness and ability, but funding continues to be overwhelmingly aimed at furthering these platforms — while journalists struggle to keep up.

Or add an @username to use as the "via" source of the tweet:

Schardt says that [tweetable via="INN"]finding creative journalists with an awareness of what technologies are available to them is half the battle.[/tweetable] The advancements themselves outpace the average newsroom's awareness and ability, but funding continues to be overwhelmingly aimed at furthering these platforms — while journalists struggle to keep up.

(For sites using Largo this will automatically populate with your organization's Twitter @username if you have added it on the Appearance > Theme Options page.)

And the result looks like this .

Give it a try and let us know what you think!