Has Twitter’s killing of share counts on tweet buttons reduced people’s sharing activity?
By one measure, yes. Shareaholic reported today that it’s seeing 11.28 percent less sharing using the Twitter button on its network since Twitter turned off tweet count totals on Nov. 20.
The reduction is in the “share of voice,” the relative share of people using the Twitter button as opposed to buttons for Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and other social networks’ social sharing buttons on the more than 300,000 sites that use Shareaholic’s social sharing plugin. In the 3 1/2 months before Nov. 20, Twitter had a 12.39-percent Shareaholic share of voice average; in the two weeks since, the average has dropped to 11 percent.
The news will give critics of Twitter’s change another point to argue. Some publishers believe that the display of the number of times an article has been shared socially is an important signal of popularly, “social proof” that makes people more likely to read and share content.
We’ve asked Twitter for comment and will update this post if the company responds.
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