There are several options within Hubbub Pro to refresh your social share counts. Below, we’ll go over how share counts are pulled in with Hubbub Pro and where you can refresh those share counts.

How are Social Share Counts Calculated

Hubbub Pro will only return the numbers (shares of your post URL) that social networks send Hubbub Pro via an API. Hubbub Pro doesn’t keep track of the shares on its own – they are pulled in from the socials themselves.

Here’s a quick rundown of the process for displaying the share counts on your site!

1. The social networks keep track of shares and come up with a total number for each post URL
2. The socials are connected with Hubbub Pro (and other social sharing plugins) via an API. The socials send their share number to that API.
3. Hubbub Pro checks the API every few hours, updating as necessary (more on that below!), and that’s where the numbers you’re seeing on your posts come from.
4. Hubbub Pro displays the number that the socials gave. Hubbub Pro doesn’t have any capabilities of actually counting the shares or manipulating them, it’s not a part of Hubbub Pro’s engineering or purpose.

Options for Refreshing Social Share Counts:

1 – Auto-refresh: This happens automatically and no action is needed on your end for this to happen. Depending on the post’s or page’s age, a new set of share counts will be pulled as follows:

• once every two hours for posts younger than 10 days;
• once every six hours for posts older than 10 days, but younger than 20 days;
• once every twelve hours for posts older than 20 days.

If the counts are lower when pinged for the auto-refresh, the share counts on your post won’t update, you’ll keep the higher number. If the counts are higher than what’s currently showing, then at that point, your counts would be updated to the higher number.

2 – Refresh Shares button in the post editor: This option is a bit different as it resets the share data and then pings the API to grab the share counts from the different socials.

Since the data is basically wiped clean, it’s taking the actual shares that the API returns and updating your post with those shares, regardless of whether the counts are higher or lower.

We suggest only using the post editor refresh share button if you change the URL of a post or notice that something is really, really, off with your share counts.

Please note that using this feature MAY result in your share counts displaying as lower than before. If you aren’t sure which option to choose, feel free to email us at [email protected].