Late last year you may have noticed something different beneath the Twitter logo on your favorite blog or website — no more share counts. Even before then, though, Social platforms like LinkedIn were also withholding share data.

These handy little metrics were once considered an indicator of content’s Popularity, but Twitter claimed they were misleading and often an inaccurate reflection of popularity (because the count didn’t include retweets, quote tweets, etc.), so it removed them. This forced many Social Media users to attempt to replace that valuable data from social media sites with other popularity metrics. Many companies, too, have been steadily launching their own analytics platforms to provide query-based data and measure audience engagement, partially as a response to growing gaps in social data quality.

For more insight on your tweets, you can still track your Twitter account’s popularity by using Google Analytics, Twitter’s backend analytics, hashtag reports and other tools. Evaluating the frequency at which your hashtags are mentioned and taking a closer look at your Twitter page’s traffic can help you stay in touch with your social media engagement without share counts.

Similarly, LinkedIn allows you to use analytics from Google and its own site, among other social-data-gathering solutions. But if you want a way to quickly get the share count for a given LinkedIn post, you can simply plug the post’s URL directly into LinkedIn’s API call: http://www.linkedin.com/countserv/count/share?url=YOUR_URL_HERE

With solutions abound, finding one to match your needs is a matter of mapping your requirements.