If you’ve been wondering why all of your LinkedIn share counters don’t seem to work, don’t worry, it isn’t you, it’s LinkedIn. The company posted an innocuous announcement about killing of the feature and buried it their developer blog.
In addition to the counter function being removed, they blitzed all the existing underlying data which means all of your existing share counters will be set back to zero (assuming they aren’t there already). #WithFriendsLikeThese
LinkedIn failed to provide any real justification other than “share count on its own doesn’t fully reflect the impact that a piece of content delivers.”
That’s dev-speak for “we’re going to start charging you for meta which used to be free and force you to access it through our site.”
On the bright side, if LinkedIn was looking for another way to marginalize user engagement, they just found it.
In the meantime, you can always explore options with your web developer for manually adjusting the share count based on metrics from your Google Analytics account, but really, unless you have crazy good levels of source traffic from LinkedIn, it’s almost certainly a negative return on investment.
