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Why does BuzzSumo display different engagement counts from my social plug-in?
Why does BuzzSumo display different engagement counts from my social plug-in?

Information on how we calculate engagement and shares.

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Written by Evan Ahlers
Updated over a week ago

BuzzSumo updates social engagement counts in fixed time intervals and caches them on our servers. We tend to crawl newer content more frequently, especially in our Monitoring and Trending sections. Our research shows that the majority of content drives engagement within the first few days after publication.

We then update most article engagement counts on a weekly and monthly basis so the discrepancies should be low. 

To "force" our crawlers to update counts more quickly, enter the article's canonical URL into the Content Analyzer search bar. We will update the article within 30 minutes.

You can also use our Chrome Extension to get real-time engagements for any article while browsing the web. This will also instruct our crawlers to update the data in the web app or index the article if it hasn't yet been added to our database.

Further steps

If you've taken these steps and the results are still not updated, there may be an error with the canonical URL. We use the canonical URL to attribute engagements back to the correct article.

To check your canonical URL, right click on the page (Ctrl-Click on a Mac) and select “View Page Source."

Then, search for it using Ctrl-F (Command+F on a Mac) and entering "canonical" in the search box. 

If the canonical and article URLs are not the same, instruct your developers or SEO to address it immediately.

If the canonical URL is present and correct yet the counts are still not appearing as you expect, please contact our support team.

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