How Share Counter Values Work

For count services, ShareThis uses our own proprietary count service — not the native share count API. For example, we’re not counting all the shares of a given URL to Facebook/Twitter; we’re counting the shares that came through the Twitter ShareThis button.

There is JavaScript code for all of the buttons that will increment the counter immediately up being clicked. From there, every few hours we update and push the information of completed shares that occur from our backend logging system. So there’s immediate interactivity for the user experience combined with periodic updates of the data from our data logs.

Note

The sharing count for ShareThis buttons is tied to the URL of the page. This means that if the URL is changed, then the counts will reset. Changes to the URL can include:

• Changing the URL to something new
• Switching from one sub-domain to another
• Changing SSL (e.g., updating from HTTP to HTTPS)
• Including a re-direct on the URL
• Implementing the data-URL parameter on the button code with a different URL than the page URL

At this time, unfortunately, there is no way to transfer/export the stats between different URLs.