Audience Tracking is paused

You might be aware that our Audience Tracking feature uses Twitter’s legacy API. Because of changes from Twitter’s new owner, we expect to lose access very soon, which will prevent us from operating Audience Tracking in its current state.

What does this mean for my account?

Twitter is just one of 13 networks we cover, but the platform’s unique structure and size has made it our core connector-network. We’re working on new ways to provide the over-time data in Audience Tracking, but until we do, the feature will be paused. You’ll still be able to access historical data, and we are continuing to track your audience right up until Twitter makes this change (they no longer have a comms or API support team, so we don’t know when that will be). For now, you won’t be able to track new audiences, and if you stop tracking an audience, we cannot restart that tracking.

The good news: SparkToro’s Audience Research, Lists, Contact Info, Custom Search, Comparison, and the core features will continue to work as usual.

Why is this happening?

Twitter’s new owner is making some… interesting changes over there. They’re shutting down the free API (which means the end of SparkToro’s Trending, Fake Followers Audit, and the free version of Sparkscore) and the legacy paid API. We’ve looked into Twitter’s new, paid API, but the functionality we need for Audience Tracking is no longer available.

This is not something we hoped would happen, and we’re sad that Twitter’s API team isn’t offering anything that could serve our use-case (in fairness, most of them are no longer with the company).

What are we doing about it?

Since the ownership change last November, we’ve been working on rebuilding our systems to be less reliant on Twitter (we guessed the new guy might do this). In a matter of months, we expect to have a resilient, network-agnostic system with no singular connector network (our eggs are going to be spread over lots of different baskets to prevent this from happening again). Once these changes are live, we’ll send an update.

All the best,

Rand, Casey, and Amanda from SparkToro