Changes are coming to the way you see Twitter every day.

The microblogging site has redesigned Tweet and Follow buttons and is losing the share count - the displayed number of times a tweet has been shared -

In a post on the Twitter community forum, the company announced its decision to remove share counts, a feature that has been part of share buttons for the last five years.

Reasons why YOU should care about this issue

The impact Twitter’s decision (and its unavoidable consequences) will have on you and your business depends on how you function online.

Here are a few of the most likely situations and outcomes:

If you’re a blogger, your Tweet button won’t show visitors how many times your latest post (or any post) has been shared – Could lead to fewer shares and less interaction?

If you’re an online pro who gets paid big bucks for helping promote brands, you’ll lose a primary way of showing advertisers how popular you are with the online masses – Social Proof. That could put a dent in your bank account

If you’re a third-party app developer, you may be in deep waters – without access to Tweet share counts, your app may lose a critical part of its functionality, and you may lose subscribers

Possible solutions

Solution 1:

Twitter suggests to use their REST API instead. If you do a search for a URL using Twitter’s REST API, you could theoretically count the results and use that number.

These search results only go back a few days so over time the count would become inaccurate. Additionally tweets from private accounts do not show up.

Using the REST API requires a fair bit of programming and involves authentication. Not very easy for the average user. Still, better than nothing.

Solution 2:

Use:

http://opensharecount.com

If you care about the future of the internet - and especially if you do business online - don’t leave without reading, bookmarking, and sharing this.

It’s that important.