08 Oct Why Is Twitter Getting Rid of Share Counts?
Twitter’s recent announcement that they are deprecating the Twitter Share Count API is giving some marketers heart palpitations, but to me this is a sign of a company that’s finally maturing albeit in ways that will make life difficult to marketers in the short-term. Here’s some simple math to illustrate:
New-ish permanent product-focused CEO (Jack Dorsey) + new revenue-focused COO (Adam Bain)
+ Cleaning up their API infrastructure and removing things that don’t make them money
+ Launching new potential revenue-generating products
Buy Button[br]
Event Targeting[br]
Brand Pages
= Good move
Remember, Facebook did the exact same thing before finally getting on solid financial footing, such as removing fan gates and getting rid of all of those money sucking FB-related languages/APIs/infrastructures (ie, FBML, FQL, logical algorithms [organic reach is stupid], etc). Remember how marketers thought the world was ending when those changes were implemented? Twitter appears on track to be doing the same types of things if recent news is any indication.
That said, Twitter is still a mess and kind of stuck in 2014. Users are leaving and moving on to other more relevant/useful social networks like Instagram. Other networks are pushing the future — Facebook, for example, is making moves into Virtual Reality land with it’s purchase of Oculus. Meanwhile Twitter’s new Moments release kind of looks like Snapchat Stories. Not necessarily a bad thing, but just shows that Dorsey/Bain have a huge hill to climb in terms of producing innovative revenue-generating products while, at the same time, bringing back users.
So, expect more changes like the deprecation of the Twitter Share Count API and the launch of new products in the near future accompanied with a lot of messiness and marketers losing their minds.
