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Twitter links take ages to appear in OSE. We've got a corporate Twitter account that is very active and it still hasn't shown up in OSE even after a year or so of active use. The accounts of our competitors are 50/50 - some can be found in OSE, some not. I wouldn't worry about it too much - there's not much you can do about it. Just because OSE can't see it (yet) - doesn't mean that Google can't see it.

Actually neither Facebook nor Twitter grant Google direct access.  Relationships/partnerships were attempted but the efforts broke down.  That's why Google came out with Google+.  They know how important social media is to their desire to improve search results (and get more money from AdWords and other Google revenue channels.  So they decided - if we can't get direct access, we'll just create (and artificially force) our own. They do make use of whatever they can get from all social platforms that public.  they just don't have the depth of access they would prefer. As for what's being faked, that's part of why they want full control and access, both.  Yet I'm sure they're working on how to figure it out best they can with Twitter - facebook is nearly impossible though without that inside access.

Sorry for the delay Carin! Been crazy busy with meetings I appreciate your offer of help, and will sned you examples later today! Kind Regards, Mike.

Hi PhotoGazza, We pull Facebook Shares and Facebook Likes from Facebook's FQL. They define Shares as, "The number of times users have shared the page on Facebook." and Likes as, "The number of times Facebook users have 'Liked' the page, or liked any comments or re-shares of this page." In this context, a page is defined as a URL on the web (ie not a Facebook page). So, I believe that a share is a count of the total number of times that Facebook knows a URL has been shared on Facebook in general (whether through a status update, comment, etc, public and private) but to be perfectly honest, Facebook doesn't make it 100% clear. You can check out their documentation here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/link_stat/ Hope that helps. Let me know if you have any more questions. Thanks! Miranda