Question

I’m planning to switch a website to another theme (WordPress based). The current website has multiple articles with a lot of social shares. I’d like to keep those share counts (number of tweets, likes etc.) for each existing article. The website will be hosted on the same domain and same url/permalink structure.

The new website will have a new theme and the Social Shares buttons are deliverd through another plugin (Jetpack instead of DiggDigg). My question is: will I keep my Social Share counts for every article?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Generally, if the URLs for your site remain the same, your social share counts should remain the same as well. The social share buttons from each service (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, G+, etc) base their counts on the number of times that particular canonical URL has been shared – not based on how many times that specific button on the page has been clicked.

The Digg Digg to Jetpack migration would be the only possible hiccup – looking at a site I have that uses Digg Digg, it appears that it utilizes the native Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and G+ buttons. Which means there should be no problem transferring your “Likes” and “Shares” OUT of Digg Digg and into something else.

Looking at the Jetpack code from their demo site, however, it appears there may be a problem: it looks like it may auto-append a URL variable onto the end of shared URLs to aid in tracking. Check out their demo site here:

http://jetpack.me/support/sharing/

The code of a normal Facebook Share Button via Digg Digg on this page would look like this:

<div class='dd_button'>
    <script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1"></script>
    <fb:like href="http://jetpack.me/support/sharing/" send="false" show_faces="false"  layout="box_count" width="50"  ></fb:like>
</div>

The code of Jetpack’s share button on the same page looks like:

<div class="sd-content">
    <a rel="nofollow" class="share-facebook sd-button share-icon" href="http://jetpack.me/support/sharing/?share=facebook" title="Share on Facebook" id="sharing-facebook-755">
        <span>Facebook</span>
    </a>
</div>

…and plugs the share-facebook class into the appropriate sharing code via javascript.

The important thing is, if you look at the URL used by Jetpack, it has ?share=facebook appended to the end, when the page shared by Digg Digg is actually http://jetpack.me/support/sharing/.

If Jetpack adds those URL variables to the ends of all shared links by default, then you’ll need to investigate a way to remove it in order to keep your share counts. But whether you can do that without affecting Jetpack’s operation? That’s the question.

If you can’t remove the URL variable from the links, it’s likely that LinkedIn, Facebook, G+, etc will see them as separate links, and thus will reset the share count.