Social Share Count API

Use the Social Share Count API to get access to total sharing activity for a URL. Use it to display share counts on your social buttons or anywhere else in your application.

Overview

ShareThis captures share related activity for URLs across its vast network of over 3.0 million sites through the ShareThis buttons. This data primarily includes user shares and visits from their friends clicking on shared links within social networks. The API allows a client application to access this data for a specified URL.

Examples of usage include determining the popularity of a URL based on it’s social sharing metrics, displaying counters of share activity and social data processing/mining applications.

Setup

To enable Social Counts on your website, you need to install the ShareThis script which includes the share button’s div tags. If you want to implement your own buttons using the Web Share API, you can set the div tags to “display:none” in the CSS. Not adding the script and the tags will cause an error in computing your social counts.

Get URL Information

Endpoint: 

count-server.sharethis.com/v2.0/get_counts?url=<url>

The share count API takes a single parameter: url.

Example:

count-server.sharethis.com/v2.0/get_counts?url=https://www.sharethis.com

This will return all shares for the sharethis.com URL.

Using our Legacy API endpoint?

If publisher is using legacy widget (wd.sharethis.com), change to:

count-server.sharethis.com/v2.0/get_counts?wd=true&url=<url>

How different is the response of new endpoint from legacy endpoint?

REST API endpoint response

  •  inbound is called clicks in new API 
  • outbound is called shares in new API
REST API             COUNT SERVER 
inboundclicks
outboundshares
total : { “inbound”: 0, “outbound”: 0}{ “clicks”: {“all” : 0},  “shares”: {“all”: 0}}