SHOULD SOCIAL MEDIA COMPANIES CHARGE TO ACCESS THEIR API?

Twitter has stuffed up. It is the only social media company charging businesses to access their Twitter API. We know this because our Social Wall is used to integrate with the Twitter API to display Twitter posts from the user’s accounts and also display tweets based on the Twitter hashtag. Our company Advertise Me, a digital solutions company decided to drop the support for Twitter on the standard subscription plan for Social Wall and we will only support Twitter for events and custom branding packages. You can read more about this here: IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: TWITTER INTEGRATION

Paying US$100 a month for the basic plan was not worth it for us since we only charge our clients AU$30 per month, which meant that we would need to increase our costs by AU$150 (factoring conversion) so the total cost the client would be paying AU$180 per month. This would be a 500% increase in their monthly cost so you can see why we decided to drop the Twitter API integration. There is also the Enterprise plan, which apparently costs $49,000 a month. I feel sympathetic to SaaS Social Media publishing tools that use the Twitter API as a core function for their tool.

As part of this Twitter API change, Twitter is also forcing Twitter developers to use v2 of the API and as such you also need to decide which Twitter API plan to use. They will suspend your developer app and you need to log in to your account and choose the plan.

You probably received an email message in the past few weeks that is something like this:

Hello,
This is a notice that your app – xxx – has been suspended from accessing the Twitter API. However, you can self-serve reactivate your app for free.

Please take the following steps to get your app quickly running again on the new Free or Basic plans available at developer.twitter.com:

1. Subscribe to either Free or Basic via our website.
2. When signing up, you will be able to pick 1 (Free) or 2 (Basic) apps that you want to remain active. They will be reactivated automatically after you complete your sign-up.
3. Please update the code in your app to use v2 endpoints – this is valid to all endpoints except for media upload endpoints which are not currently supported on v2 so you can continue to use those on v1.1.

We apologize for any inconveniences this transition might have caused. By following these steps, you can continue to seamlessly use the Twitter API.

For more information, please refer to our developer community forums.

Regards,
Twitter Developer Platform

You then have to follow those steps and select the plan.

The Twitter API v2 plan structure is as follows:

Free – a package that provides free access to Twitter APIs

• Apps – 1 environment
• Tweets – post up to 1500 Tweets per month

Basic – cost $100 per month Build using all of Twitter’s powerful v2

• API endpoints Apps – 2 environments
• Tweets – Retrieve up to 10K tweets per month

When you login to the Twitter developer app account you will see this message at the top:

The error message: This App has violated Twitter Rules and policies. As a result, it can no longer be accessed. An email has been sent to xxx with details. For assistance, submit a support ticket.

To solve this issue, simply choose the plan you need and save.

You then have to make sure you’re using the v2 API. If you need some guidance on how to do this watch this video:

I don’t believe social media companies should charge business or their clients to access their API especially if their tool is free. Having an API serves the ultimate goal of seamlessly integrating solutions without any charge. It is unfair to charge for this basic functionality. What are your thoughts?

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