New Twitter Button Updates Disrupts Sharing From Websites

When the new Twitter updates were announced last week website owners and publishers were assured: no action was needed.

However we noticed here that the new Twitter buttons were not passing in the extra parameters when used on our sites. Apparently they were all impacted by this bug:

It initially affected all of our posts and on all of our sites, but our development team corrected (for the majority of them) by changing our “related” parameter which had an apostrophe in the text – so that most will work. You will note however, that if you attempt to share a post that has an apostrophe in the title, you won’t get all the title and the “via @marketingland” data included – you’ll just get the link.

We also noticed that the Tweet button is not shortening the article links, and we are apparently not the only site having this trouble:

It’s a bit soon to tell what kind of impact that this is having on retweets and clickthroughs on links via Twitter for Marketing Land, but looking at our sister site’s bit.ly stats, you can see a slight decrease.

We’ll keep an eye on the Twitter dev blog for when they’ve gotten this sorted. In the meantime someone please remind Twitter that we weren’t supposed to have to do anything as a result of this update.

About The Author

Monica Wright

Monica Wright serves as Vice President of Audience Engagement for Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. With over 15 years of experience in online publishing, content marketing and audience development for media companies, she is focused on content consumption and measuring user engagement on both sites across multiple platforms including desktop, mobile, social and email. In addition, she serves as a program coordinator for the SMX conference series, produced by parent company Third Door Media, publisher of Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. You can find Monica on Twitter @monicawright, LinkedIn and Google+.