We need to talk about social sharing counts. Content marketers have developed a serious addiction to them that I think is bordering on unhealthy–and I’m saying this as one of the folks on the team that created Flare, a social sharing bar app!
Share counts are in danger of becoming the new Pageview, because they have the same traits as any vanity metric: They’re easily inflated, generate impressive-sounding numbers with lots of digits, and are difficult to tie to actual, meaningful engagement on the part of the visitor…
Forget your Twitter share count. Social referral traffic is more important.
