Subscribers: Include Social Followers Count

[Aurorum]

Proposed Changes

Include the Social Followers count under My Sites > Users > Subscribers.

Why are these changes being made?

It's become a very regular occurrence for those in Support to handle tickets asking about why there is a discrepancy between the Subscribe block/widget and the subscriber count shown in Calypso. The discrepancy arises because the Subscribe block includes Social Followers: https://wordpress.com/support/wordpress-editor/blocks/subscribe-block/#settings

In contrast, the Social Follower count cannot be found anywhere in Calypso. By including this count, the user is at least able to deduce why the two do not match.

(Sample tickets: 8260141-zen; 8215037-zen; p1717136974941409-slack-C03TY6J1A)

Testing Instructions

Go to My Sites > Users > Subscribers and verify that the Social Followers count appears. It should not appear if the site has no Social Followers at all.

cc @simison, @JuanLucha, @pkuliga

[simison]

Hi! We've been moving away from social follower counts:

• It confuses as we don't anymore get fresh counts from services, and specifically don't support Twitter anymore. (Jetpack blog, WordPress.com blog). The social followers don't get posts auto-shared anymore like email subscribers do.

• The subscribe block still supports "include follower count" to be backwards compatible, but you can toggle social counts off and it's disabled by default for new blocks:

  

The way to go about this would be to educate customers about differences between the social/subscriber count, and how they can disable the social count in the subscribe block.

In contrast, the Social Follower count cannot be found anywhere in Calypso

These used to be visible at Stats, but as they were misleading, they were removed from there as well. Eventually we'll want to remove the social counts in the subscribe block as well but we're not working on it right now.

cc @crisbusquets @pablinos in case any extra thoughts/context.

[Aurorum]

Hi @simison, thanks for your detailed comment! :) Sorry, by the way, I meant to clarify to start with - I was hoping that this PR might start some discussion on the topic as I expected those were the reasons for not originally including them:

The way to go about this would be to educate customers about differences between the social/subscriber count, and how they can disable the social count in the subscribe block.

I broadly agree, but I personally feel this comes up enough times (almost daily in my experience!) that there are enough confused users to justify adding this snippet, which would ease the burden on Support and make things immediately a lot clearer for users. As a result, I feel like the decision to exclude it is now doing more harm than good (though I understand the reasons behind that decision!).

As such, I was wondering whether you'd be willing to re-consider that decision to exclude them? In my experience, the user often doesn't understand why a number would be displayed in the front-end and not the back-end, even if it is just for backwards compatibility.

Let me know if that makes sense and happy to close if not. :)

[simison]

@pablinos what's the latest with these social counts? Are we updating them anymore, and if not, why not to remove them entirely from sites?