I did something pretty similar to this for Niche Pursuits (http://www.nichepursuits.com/amazon-fba-in-30-days/), and just made a javascript function that called the social button code in as soon as the user hovered over the social box (see the Twitter and Google Plus boxes), so it wouldn’t bog down load time.

You can also grab the total shares with an API call to each of the social sharing backends, and save it as a WordPress option so you don’t have to query externally for each page load.

Short answer – code.

Here is a post in German from a guy who knows what he is doing. Code is Code.

http://www.torbenleuschner.de/blog/790/pagespeed-social-buttons-nachladen-lassen/

Another option is to pull the share count with a every 5 minutes and store it in your database. Then pull the share count from your database and display it on the frontend. If some clicks you can simulate to up the counter +1.

The links you need are usually very simple: e.g.
http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://staging.smashdigital.com/TWS5

Thanks Chris,
Do you have any tips for this?

Chris

Nathan Safran from Blue Nile Research. Thank you so much for the kind words about my research–really appreciate it and hope your readers find it equally valuable.

Nathan