Numbers of Social Shares on LinkedIn

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How many times was a LinkedIn post (such as this one , for example) shared – on LinkedIn and on other social sites? When you view a LinkedIn post, you see the numbers of “views” and “likes”, but not the number of shares.

There used to be a hack to look up the numbers of shares – by opening the posts in an incognito window. That no longer works. However, LinkedIn doesn’t make a secret of the number of shares. In fact, LinkedIn has an API call that returns the number of shares for any URL.

If you do not write software code, you can still access this API call directly, via the following URL:

https://www.linkedin.com/countserv/count/share?format=json&url=<URL>

Replace the <URL> above with the actual URL of the page that interests you. As an example, here is the number of shares for my yesterday’s post:

https://www.linkedin.com/countserv/count/share?format=json&url=https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/breaking-5-major-boolean-syntax-changes-irina-shamaeva

Note: if you are copying a URL, make sure you strip off any parameters, i.e. the part that goes after the question mark (if present). For example, for the URL above, you may land on https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/breaking-5-major-boolean-syntax-changes-irina-shamaeva/edit?trk=pulse-edit-nav_art – just remove the part starting with the question mark (?trk=…) before checking the number of shares.

Of course, the above method is clunky and lacks user friendliness.

Other social networks have similar API calls that provide the numbers of shares for any given web page.

My favorite tool that takes advantage of those API calls on several social networks is the Chrome extension called ShareMetric. It provides the numbers of shares for the currently open URL on various networks. Here is what its display looks like:

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View my LinkedIn posts and please feel free to share. 🙂

 

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