Hi,
shares done via the share buttons are totally independant. They are not equal to the shares of a facebook post. Shares on a facebook post are done via the share function in facebook.
Shares beside the MashShare Share buttons are the shares which are generated during clicking on the MashShare buttons.
All share plugins are working that way. Its not possible to count shares of a facebook post and merge it with shares of your website.
Hi Rene,
It’s confusing because it seems like all my previous posts (except the last one) did count the shares from FB and other social media networks along with the shares from my blog.
If it’s not possible to count shares of a FB post and merge it with shares of your website then what is the Facebook Count option supposed to do? Isn’t supposed to count the total of likes + shares + comments of the post on FB?
Thanks for your help!
As a side note, I’ll be happy to provide you the links in a private message.
Thank you,
My experience is same as gmessage’s. All my previous posts from before a few days ago did count all shares/likes/comments from all FB pages and showed the total number. That was the whole point of the plugin – telling the readers how viral the article actually is overall. Recently all pages that are doing this calculation (such as http://www.sharedcount.com/) seem to be getting wrong numbers.
SharedCount is now shutting down due to some kind of change in FB API: http://www.sharedcount.com/notes/facebook_api_shutdown.php. Could it be that the issue we are experiencing with your plugin is due to the same API change? It its also pretty much matching the time when the problem started to appear.
@tilk MashShare is using the (deprecated) API endpoint https://api.facebook.com/method/links.getStats?format=json&urls=https://www.yoursite.com/page-you-claim
Can you compare the returning share count with the share count of your facebook page with checking the link above? Just use the url of your page!
Please also let me know the url of your page and the I like to compare it with and internal tool.
The API endpoint we are using is looking up usually URLs that get shared from outside facebook not for internal things within Facebook or any social network. Sometimes you’ll see results for those types of URLs though. (Its facebook’s secret how shares are calculated during different endpoints)
We are now checking if we can use a newer Facebook API and not longer the deprecated endpoint. There seems to be a valid way to get a total count which includes all shares and comments:
This message has been sent recently by a facebook engineer (unconfirmed notice on stackoverflow):
… if person A shares a link (for example, https://www.mashshare.net/), this generates a story on person A’s timeline. If person B comments on this story, this in turn generates a story on person B’s timeline. Querying … the API would then return a count of 2.
As for the number your plugin shows, I believe it does count also comments and those are usually within Facebook, not outside, right?
For example another post from yesterday: http://www.islamonline.sk/2016/08/islam-u-nas-existoval-uz-v-stredovekom-uhorsku/
Shared count gives the same total number of shares as your plugin: http://www.sharedcount.com/#url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.islamonline.sk%2F2016%2F08%2Fislam-u-nas-existoval-uz-v-stredovekom-uhorsku%2F, incl. 21 comments. There is however only one comment on my site, so other 20 commnets must be from within Facebook somewhere where it someone shared.
FB post for reference: https://www.facebook.com/IslamOnline.sk/posts/10154382494792629
Checked with latest facebook api and get the same numbers so at least the API endpoint still seems to be working as intended by facebook. However i am not able to deduce the facebook internal logic behind this numbers. It seems sometimes facebook internal shares are counted sometimes not. Maybe that’s because a FB internal share is only counted as share when it has been seen or interacted by another user.
Hi Rene,
Thank you for your reply.
I just sent you a message at support@mashshare.net.
Hopefully we can get this solved.
Thank you for your time!
Like others in this thread, the share count for my latest post is wrong. The value of the mashshare custom field gives some clues. Compare these two custom field values. The first is from the latest post, and the second is from a previous post.
{“total”:14,”linkedin”:2,”pinterest”:0,”buffer”:0,”twitter”:12,”stumbleupon”:0,”google”:0,”vk”:0}
{“total”:239,”pinterest”:0,”linkedin”:1,”buffer”:1,”google”:0,”twitter”:39,”stumbleupon”:0,”facebook_total”:197,”vk”:1}
Notice that facebook_total is missing from the new post.
Updated information about how facebook is calculating its share count:
https://www.mashshare.net/facebook-calculate-share-count/
If you are noticing for a few url’s zero or less shares:
We are already working hard on this and will have a solution very soon.
