Announcing: Social Share Count Proxy API - Better, Faster & Secure Share Counts

Announcing: Social Share Count Proxy API – Better, Faster & Secure Share Counts Jay Meattle • Jul 3, 2019 • 4 min read

We’re extremely excited that our new Share Count Proxy API service is available today to all Shareaholic Site Profiles on the Pro plan and above — review instructions on to enable the Share Count Proxy API for your Site Profile. Takes less than 5 minutes to setup. This service is also available for use programmatically via API.

Why You Need the Share Count Proxy for Your Website

The Share Count Proxy API functions much like a secure VPN service. Once enabled, all Share Count requests to the various Social Networks are proxied through this service. Doing so, results in:

🔒 Better Protection of Visitor Privacy / Easier GDPR Compliance

The “original” share buttons from Facebook, Pinterest and others automatically transmit data of your visitors to the social network sites as soon as they visit your website. This is also the case if you use custom Share Buttons (such as a plugin) and choose to display Share Counts. Data is shared without the need for visitors to click on a share button and therefore have no choice.

The Shareaholic’s Share Count Proxy API fixes this by allowing your site visitors to see how popular your pages are without needless leakage to the social networks (unless they decide to share, of course). Once enabled, all Share Count queries to the Social Networks are proxied through this API securely and visitor privacy is protected (like an anonymous VPN).
📈 Better Facebook Share Counts

Have your Facebook Share Counts recently “reset”?

This is because Facebook updated their API recently to require authentication to lookup Share Counts. This was not the case earlier. It is not possible to safely make such authenticated requests without a server-side solution, like this proxy. If you use this Proxy API, you’ll be able to set Facebook App credentials and make authenticated calls for better counts. You will also get much higher Facebook API limits.

Plus, since this Proxy API protects user privacy, Firefox and other major browsers do not default block requests to it like they do to client-side requests to Facebook’s and other such APIs.
🚀 Faster Website Speed

This proxy consolidates what would have been multiple client-side HTTP requests (one for each social network) to a single HTTP/2 compatible request for your visitors. By cutting down on requests, your website will load faster. Plus, the proxy lives on our optimized servers that are super-specialized for retrieving, caching and serving, so your own servers and database run faster as they have to do less work.
💵 Save Money on Your Web Hosting

Retrieving, caching and serving Share Counts can be a server and database intensive activity which can test even the best of web hosts. Because this service lives on Shareaholic servers, you and your host don’t need to deal or worry about any of this. Save on your hosting bill, let us do the heavy lifting instead. Also, because the service is hosted, it works with any CMS, including Shopify, Wix, and Blogspot.

Next step:

p.s. if you’re using our WordPress plugin, you have the option to enable a self-hosted version of a Share Count Proxy that is built into the plugin for free. However, we highly recommend our premium hosted option as self-hosting Share Counts yourself can be a resource hog on your server. A dedicated service to keep Shareaholic light on site resources is your simplest and fastest option. Our servers do all the heavy lifting such as storage, rate limiting, caching, and more behind the scenes work while keeping your website fast. An added advantage of the premium version are much higher API lookup limits — which is necessary for larger sites.