Twitter’s API Rule Change Will Impact Your Social Media Metrics
Twitter ruffled a few pickles today when they announced changes to their API rules of engagement. As a social media analytics person, I was interested in how the news would affect our social media metrics.
One of the key components in analyzing your social media engagement is to understand viewing and interaction behavior. That means understanding where people are reading your status updates, what types of links they click on and whether there is more engagement with your Twitter updates on a third-party service like Flipboard compared to Twitter.com.
In today’s announcement, Twitter has basically said that the user experience needs to be consistent with Twitter.com. If users are looking at your tweets through a third-party, like Flipboard for example, where the experience is considerably different then that service may be shutdown. In doing so, Twitter will change how users interact and engage with your updates. The type of engagement may change and that could have consequences for your data and social media activities.
The move follows the announcement in July when Twitter shut down some of the traffic to LinkedIn. Followers who received their Twitter updates through LinkedIn were out-of-luck.
All of those factors impact your social media engagement and, ultimately, your social media ROI. Changes to ecosystems like Twitter shutting down some of its linkage with LinkedIn, along with more recent news, alters how people engage your brand on social media and your social media metrics.
