To display Twitter and Facebook share counts, you need to configure them. Don’t worry, it only takes a few minutes.
Enable Twitter counts
Twitter stopped offering their share count API a couple of years ago, but thankfully the amazing team over at cognitive SEO created TwitCount. This is a completely free service that aggregates all this data.
Follow the steps below to enable Twitter share counts.
Step 1
Click into the Novashare plugin settings.
Step 2
Under the “Options” tab click “Configuration.” Toggle on the option “Enable Twitter Counts.”
Step 3
Visit twitcount.com and sign up for a free account. Before clicking the button, make sure you are logged into the Twitter account you want to use for your site.
Step 4
Input your domain for which you want it to count shares. For example, with our @novashareio Twitter, we have it looking at our novashare.io website. Any posts or pages shared from novashare.io on Twitter will then be counted.
And that’s it! Once you have TwitCount setup, Twitter shares will start showing up on your site.
Note: According to TwitCount, counts will start appearing in approximately 1 hour. This is due to the API limitations. The API provides information only for the tweets in the last week or so. This means that old pages may show incomplete counts. Starting the day you configure TwitCount, all new pages will have complete counts data.
Facebook app ID and secret
To set up Facebook shares, you need to create a Facebook developer application. Don’t worry, this is easy and completely free. All it requires is that you have a Facebook account.
Follow the steps below to enable Facebook share counts.
Step 1
Visit developers.facebook.com/apps/ and click “Add a New App.”
Step 2
Input your display name and contact email. You can choose anything for the display name. We typically use our domain name. Then click “Create App ID.”
Step 3
Click into “Settings → Basic.”
Step 4
Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click “Add Platform.” Then click “Website.”
Step 5
Add your website’s URL and click “Save Changes.”
Step 6
Scroll back up to the top and input your website’s Privacy Policy URL and Terms of Service URL. These aren’t technically required, but we recommend that you add these.
Step 7
At the very top, copy your Facebook App ID and App Secret to your clipboard as you will need to enter this in the Novashare plugin settings.
Step 8
Back on your WordPress site, click into the Novashare plugin settings.
Step 9
Under the “Options” tab click “Configuration.” Paste in your Facebook App ID and Facebook App Secret.
Step 10
Scroll down and click “Save Changes.”