

Show HN: The Most-Shared Posts on TechCrunch - erans
http://sharepops.com/mostshared/techcrunch.com

======
incision
I wonder what percentage of those shares aren't completely generic, how many
actually add anything?

As a relatively late adopter of "social", I was disappointed to find that the
vast majority of sharing seems to be raw repeating. No opinion or
contribution, just a contextless spray of links - bookmark broadcasting.

It would be interesting to see how the level of contribution when sharing
varies by site/topic.

~~~
erans
We've been analysing sharing patterns for a while. We tend to see that Twitter
shares correlate too much with the amount of posts per day which may indicate
its more bot driven.

FB Likes and +1 are much harder to fake and seems to correlate more with
actual human traffic.

From our experience +1 tends to be factored into Google search results so
there is direct value in having +1 on your site and having your visitors who
like the content click on it (not to mention it gets circulated inside Google
Plus itself).

We are working to add more sites as we go along and we would be happy to share
some information about patterns across sites and topics.

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cheald
I don't think your Facebook data is right. You're using the "total" count,
which includes likes and comments, rather than just shares. While this does
measure engagement, it isn't a measure of shares, which is what the data is
marketed as. For example, you show 28k likes for the #1 story, but Facebook's
data[1] says this:

    
    
        share_count: 7023
        like_count: 14341
        comment_count: 7328
        total_count: 28692
    

[1]
[http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?format=json&metho...](http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?format=json&method=links.getStats&urls=http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/12/10-reasons-
why-2013-will-be-the-year-you-quit-your-job/)

------
minimaxir
Is it possible to get the most-shared data without scraping every TechCrunch
post ever?

The data might be useful for a project I'm working on. :)

------
benjlang
Not surprised that James Altucher wrote the most shared post ever on
TechCrunch, excellent writer. Very useful tool, thanks for sharing it.

~~~
Mahn
Not to discredit Altucher, but I'd be willing to bet the fact the title starts
with "10 reasons..." helped to some degree.

Incidentally, I find hard to take seriously an article that enumerates things
these days; too many blogs are doing this for the sake of getting page views
(which works, but the resulting quality is often questionable, I'm looking at
you Business Insider and Mashable)

