I have looked through the API's of facebook and twitter but i cannot seem to find the answer to my question. On websites like http://punchfork.com/recipe/Porkitos-Crispy-Prosciutto-Chips-Nom-Nom-Paleo On the right hand side they have the social stats page with information such as Tweets, Facebook Shares and Stumbleupons. My question is how do they record or gather these results? Is it a case of they have a button that records it in their database then sends you to the page to tweet/share/stumble? But surely that couldn't be accurate as people might not continue to fill out the action.