At www.hitfox.com, we’re trying to include a Tweet button for each offer. While working nicely in principle, the counting of how many times people have tweeted a certain offer seems to be broken. We’ve tried everything we could think of, so I’m hoping someone here can shed some light what we’re doing wrong.
We’re including the javascript version of the button with a URL like this:
https://twitter.com/share?lang=de&related=%40HitFox&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.hitfox.com%2Fdeals%2Fstar-wars-old-republic-pc-ce%3Fpk_campaign%3DTW_SHARE&text=#HitFox #Deal: Star Wars: The Old Republic CE. Collectors Edition nur 136,95€ (DE) . Erlebe die Weiten der Star ...
When tweeting a new offer (with no tweets yet), we’re seeing one of the following behaviours:
- After tweeting, the number doesn’t go up initially. After some waiting, the tweet count will go up to 2, and searching for the tweets (by clicking on the count box) will show the correct tweet, and in addition sometimes a tweet that doesn’t have anything to do with hitfox, usually something with hotels like this one: (tweet #158216893692526592): “SPRING BREAK is right around the corner! Don’t get left at home–grab your friends & book your #Vegas getaway now! bit.ly/sqx9mz” Also, this hotel tweet will sometimes show up in the search for “our” tweet, sometimes not, but the count will stay at 2.
- After tweeting, the count doesn’t go up at all, even after waiting for some time (minutes up to an hour). When then tweeting another time, the count may sometimes go up to 4. Searching for the tweet shows 2 results (our 2 tweets). I’ve tested tweeting up to 5 times, and while the search is showing the tweets fast and correctly, the count stays at 4.
Edit: After tweeting the sixth time, the count went up to 10…
I understand that twitter is caching the hell out of everything to be able to handle its traffic. But surely the count should be correct sometimes ? Is twitter simply using discrete steps for small tweet counts (in which case it should be mentioned in the docs), or are we doing something wrong ?
