Hello Path Radio Content Partners
Thank you for sharing your great music with The Path Radio Online. You are truly appreciated. This is a quick update regarding our future ability to use Twitter to promote your content.
How We Use Twitter
Typically, as songs streamed from our radio station, they would get “tweeted” to our channel. This was possible through special coding between Twitter and our host servers. Part of the fee we paid to our host servers helped us use that special coding. You would see your songs tweeted along with your name and other information to help listeners find you and your content. On average, we tweet about 450 songs daily and about 13,500 monthly.
Twitter Is Changing Their Service
Twitter has recently announced changes to its “API” program (the special coding) such that they will cap how many tweets can be sent through it, to 1,500 monthly. Twitter’s announcement has been rather sudden, leaving mere days for its partners, like us, to sort out next steps.
While Twitter has given partners an option to pay for going beyond the 1,500 monthly tweet threshold, it’s still unclear how that would work or if their cost structure would make sense.
What Does This Mean For Song Promotion Tweets?
We believe that based on the 1 e-mail we received from Twitter about the changes on February 10th, that starting February 13th, your content will not get tweeted as frequently as it has been, or not at all. If their monthly threshold of 1,500 is true, our automated song tweets will stop after three days.
What’s Our Next Step?
Our host server providers were not given any information from Twitter ahead of time either and they too are trying to understand how to adapt to the changes or how to help us with the service we were already leveraging through them.
At this time we will not be subscribing directly to Twitter services as they’ve proven with recent subscription implementations that they’re neither reliable or consistent.
Alternatives?
The Path Radio website will continue to display
- The current song
- The upcoming song
- The last 5 played songs/content
Additionally, anyone who downloads the free iOS app will have access to all of the above automated content updates.
We will also be looking at some other options to continue elevating your content visibility and hope to send those updates to you in the future. |
