Open site explorer, why are my social media metrics incorrect?

[Alexogilvie]

In open site explorer the Facebook and twitter stats are very low in correlation to what we think it should be.

Twitter - 129

Total tweets and retweets of this URL since March 2010, including tweets of the URL with unique parameters added.

We tweet our URL and people retweet our url several times a day, why is this figure so low?

Facebook - 268 shares, 133 likes.

Our Facebook page has 16,767 likes · 1,373 talking about this.

Surely this figure should be higher? Could it be that its not linked to our site properly some how? im unsure, can any one shed any light on this please?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Reece,

Data for OSE is collected straight through the APIs of the various social services, so whatever they return is what we display.

As others have mentioned, metrics are URL specific. For Facebook, we display the activity of the URL you are examining, which is different than the activity around your Facebook page.

Hope this helps explain things a bit. Best of luck!

[TomRayner]

Couple of points of clarification here I feel:

For Facebook - it looks at the metrics of that particular URL itself, not the metrics of your Facebook page.  So your 268 shares and 133 likes are from the webpage itself, not your Facebook page.

Twitter - I believe that RTs don't count and it is based on unique tweets from unique twitter handles, but I'd need clarification on that.

[brad.s.knutson]

OpenSiteExplorer only returns the social sharing data for the specific URL you entered.  If you entered your root domain (http://example.com) it will only return the number of shares for that specific URL - not the entire domain and all sub-pages.

Likes on a Facebook page will not show up in OSE, because the number of Facebook likes returned is the number of times people on Facebook liked the specific URL you entered into OSE.

So in short - the social sharing data that OSE is returning is accurate, it's just not what you are expecting to see.  Hope that helps!