Last month, Twitter dropped share counts on its tweet buttons. In September, the company announced a new design for the buttons (as well as its follow buttons), which sites all over the web include on many pages.

Twitter made it known at the time that the share counter displayed along side the tweet button would be going away. On November 20th, that happened. Now, people are sharing content to Twitter less.

That is according to Shareaholic, which says, “We were curious as to whether this change would lead to a decline in sharing activity and share of voice for Twitter, so we pulled together and analyzed sharing activity data generated across 300,000+ sites that are powered by Shareaholic’s Content Amplification Platform. These sites collectively reach over 450 million unique visitors each month.”

Sharing activity to Twitter declined by 11.28% from November 20th to December 2nd.

“Although early data suggests that there has been a decline in Twitter sharing activity, Twitter remains one of the most popular destinations for sharing content with over 320 million active users,” Shareaholic says. “For now we recommend keeping the Twitter Share Button active.”

Considering how Twitter has been struggling to increase user growth and is trying many strategies to remedy that, it’s kind of hard to believe they made this move in the first place. People are encouraged to share when they see those numbers. I won’t be surprised if they come back.

Image via Wikimedia Commons, Shareaholic