Social Share Counts is a free Firefox extension that counts the social shares of any web page on social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter etc., all while running in your Firefox browser. This extension works from the taskbar and gives you the individual count for seven networking sites: Delicious, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, and Twitter.
We live in a digital age where the popularity and fame of anything or anyone is directly measured by the figures (likes, shares and tweets) it enjoys on the social platforms. So if you wanna know how popular a web page is on different social network websites like: Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter etc. then Social Share Counts is a good option to choose. It just requires you to open the page and does the rest. It also displays the count of shares on each of the mentioned sites in the bottom right corner of the statusbar. For different tabs, it displays different results.
However, this extension doesn’t have any customization options to change the social platforms for which you want to count the shares. Furthermore, there is no option to show or hide selective social networks for which you want to see the shares. Either you see the shares from all of the seven sites or from none.
Do note that Firefox versions after Firefox 4 do not show Status bar. So, you need to install another extension called Status-4-Evar.
Using Social Share Counts:
Follow the link given at the end of this review to install the extension. You’ll have to restart your browser to activate Social Share Counts (Do not forget to get a Status Bar extension if using it on later Firefox versions). After restart, you will get the official logos of seven social networking sites: Delicious, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, and Twitter, in the given order. Browse to any webpage and the figures of popularity on the social networks will appear as number next to their respective logos.
For Facebook, the count will be a sum of Likes, Shares and Comments on that particular shared link. For all the others, it’s simply the number of times a Link has been shared. While testing it, I also realized that it takes into account only the shares that are publicly visible (that’s quite obvious, I realize now).
As I mentioned above, there are no customization options with it. All you can do is enable and disable this extension. I would’ve appreciated it a bit more, had they given some more options with it, like, for example, the ability to use it for some selected sites only.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Takes up negligible space on the status bar.
- Gives stats for all the URLs. Be it a very popular website or a hardly known one, you’ll get all the stats.
- Has a simple interface and auto-reload with the page is an intuitive feature.
Cons
- It works only for Firefox. I would’ve liked it more if it was a little bit more compatible with browsers like Chrome, Safari etc.
- Lack of optimization is a big let down.
- Although, you get most of the leading social networks on it, there are some more sites, like Reddit and Digg, etc. that could have been included.
You can also check similar Online Services, earlier reviewed by us: Enginuity and Muck Rack.
Final Verdict
Social Share Counts is a nifty little extension. Just install and it will keep working for every webpage that you open. You might not be interested in knowing about the number of likes and tweets of every webpage you visit, but this could be very beneficial when you are browsing on some unknown website. If it gets good numbers on Social Share Counts, chances are that it is quite reliable. Overall, Social Share Counts manages to do its job just fine.
Did you try this extension? Let me know about your experience in the comments below.
