October 14th, 2015

By November 20, 2015, Twitter plans to remove share counts from both their official Tweet button and share counters across the web.

The product team at Twitter gave us a heads up, and we will gracefully remove Twitter as a supported share counter in AddToAny by early November. While counts for Twitter are going away, Twitter sharing will continue to be prominently supported on the AddToAny platform.

Existing AddToAny share counters for Twitter will simply have the counter alongside the Twitter icon removed. The Twitter share icon will remain intact, just without the counter.

Twitter’s official Tweet button will also have the counter removed, and will “render in the same pixel dimensions as a Tweet button configured without a share count today.” A bit of good news: the Tweet button will have a modern new design next month.

Publishers, developers, and designers use AddToAny share counters because they’re stylish, performant, and accurate as the official counts come directly from each supported service. Twitter, being the second most popular link sharing destination, was a key service to support since Tweets can be a strong social signal for trending content on the web.

On behalf of publishers, we are disappointed to see Twitter discontinue share counts; however, we understand Twitter’s hard decision at this point, and encourage Twitter to reconsider supporting counts at their next opportunity.

If you’re a developer and have feedback or questions for Twitter, you can post your thoughts in Twitter’s developer forum for websites.