On June 1, 2023, Twitter is changing the rules of the social media management game: here’s what you need to know.
As an introduction, I felt I had to write this blog post because no one else out there is doing it.
Two of our core values are “Honesty and openness” and “Kind, helpful and caring”. It is based on these values that I wanted to transparently share with you what has happened over the past three months with Twitter and help you understand what we need to do to move to their new enterprise API , while we do our best to minimize the cost of this transition for us and consequently for you.
The truth is that Twitter’s move to stop providing free or reasonably priced access to their API has had a profound impact on our industry and all of its stakeholders – businesses like Agorapulse and more behind you, our customer. The past three months have been a very chaotic time for all social media management vendors as we try to understand the impact of these changes and as we continually seek answers from Twitter.
At first I’ll share a short version of this with you as a TL;DR, but I’m also working on a longer version to share the whole story with you. I will share the whole story in the coming days. Stay tuned.
Shall we begin?
- Twitter has stopped offering any APIs for free, or at reasonable cost, to developers (ie software companies like Agorapulse and hundreds of others).
- They are forcing developers to subscribe to a paid package. There are 3 packages:
- “small” package costs 500 thousand dollars a year and allows the seller to manage up to 5,000 Twitter accounts at $8.40 apiece ($42,000 per month)
- “Medium” package costs 1.5 million dollars a year and lets you manage up to 7,500 Twitter accounts at $16.60 apiece ($124,500 per month)
- “Big” package costs 2.5 million dollars a year and lets you manage up to 10,000 Twitter accounts at $21 a piece ($210,000 per month)
There are other complex intricacies in what each package allows, but this gives you the big picture, is easy to understand and shows how confusing this price is. Basically, the higher the package, the more expenses you have to pay per Twitter account.
- Developers like Agorapulse who manage a significant number of Twitter accounts (we manage 12,000 of them) have been asked to pay between $1.5 million and $2.5 million per year.
- While we operate in a very competitive industry, our margins are not high. We are not alone in this. For example, Sprout Social, which is probably one of the largest and most successful businesses in our industry, continues to operate at a loss. They are a public company so their results are public. As you can see, none of us have room to incur such a cost without passing it on to our customersone way or another.
- Our choice was to either stop offering Twitter as one of the social networks we help you manage or drastically limit what you can do with Twitter in Agorapulse at no extra cost and make Twitter a paid add-on for more advanced features .
- Many businesses have already announced that they will no longer support Twitter because of the costs involved. Examples include Intercom and Microsoft. Furthermore, many businesses that used Twitter to provide customer support have also decided to stop using it due to costs. Examples include Air France and WordPress.
- We have defined it we can’t stop supporting Twitter with Agorapulse without creating a noticeable disruption in the way you manage social media today.
- We too we cannot continue to provide support for Twitter as we do today without changing our pricing model. The additional cost of $2.5 million is not something we can afford.
- To make the transition to the enterprise API, we need to temporarily reduce the number of API calls we currently makeand then, migrate our current features to this new API to provide you with better Twitter features.
- The good news is:
- The changes we need to make today are only temporary and will not last long (2 to 4 weeks);
- Our Twitter integration will be greatly improved as we release it based on their enterprise API;
- The bad news is:
- For 2 to 4 weeks, our Twitter integration will be degraded.
- Once the migration is complete, basic usage (mainly publishing) will remain included in your current plan, but more advanced usage (Inbox, Monitoring and Reporting) will require a paid add-on.
- These enhanced Twitter features will come with a additional which we estimate will cost $49 per month allowing you to receive Inbox and Reporting for up to 10 Twitter accounts. (We are still processing the data to decide on this, so more information will be shared in early June on this.)
- Our preference was not to go through a transition of 2 to 4 weeks of degraded service. To avoid this, we requested access to a sandbox or trial version of the API, but this was not an option. The only method available to avoid this period of degraded service was to pay immediately for access to the new API.
- The cost of not degrading our Twitter integration would have been almost 200 thousand dollars. After much discussion, we collectively agreed not to spend that money on early access to the API and instead invest this amount in building more of the value-added features you’ve been looking for.
- To prepare for this transition, we will temporarily do the following:
- On May 17, 2023:
- Turn off syncing retweets.
- Reduce inbox sync time from 5 minutes to 60 minutes for all enterprise and custom plan customers.
- Reduce inbox sync time from 60 minutes to 4 hours for all other plans.
- On May 23, 2023:
- Remove Twitter from our free plan.
- Remove Twitter from our free trial. Twitter will only be available after you subscribe to a paid plan.
- Turn off the listening feature.
- On May 17, 2023:
- Between June 1 and June 15, 2023we will implement the new Twitter enterprise API.
- No later than June 15, you will be able to subscribe to the Twitter extension to take advantage of Twitter’s enhanced features, such as real-time synchronization of all your articles in the inbox. We will communicate more details about this extension in early June.
- We understand that this is not appropriate. The cost for us to work within Twitter’s timelines and framework would have been $2.5 million a year, and that’s just not something we could afford. Therefore, we had to act to preserve our business by ensuring Twitter’s continued support.
- We do not plan to make money or margin in what we are doing to adapt to this new situation. Our goal is to break the tie.
- We’ll continue to work hard to minimize our reliance on the Twitter API and reduce how often we use it. Our goal is to get access to their lowest plan and minimize the cost we will have to pass on to you.
- If responding to @mentions and DMs as quickly as possible is essential to your business, I recommend using them TweetDeck as it is free and will allow you to get real-time synchronization of items in your inbox. I know this is not ideal, but it is a Plan B and will only be for 2 to 4 weeks.
- If this puts you in a difficult situation and could jeopardize your business, please contact me at: [email protected]
Thanks for reading this recap, I’ll add the whole story to a blog post in two weeks once this is all behind us.
It’s been a rough ride and we would have hoped not to include you, but Twitter left us with no choice.
Thank you for your understanding and patience. We will work hard to minimize the impact this all has on you.
