Some organizations ultimately decide to build internal tools for social media data analysis. Then they must decide between outsourcing the social data collection bit so they can focus their efforts on analyzing and visualizing the data, or building everything — including API connections to each individual publisher — internally. Establishing and maintaining those API connections over time can be costly. If your team has the money and resources to build your own social media integrations, then go for it!
But if you’re shopping for raw social media data, you should consider a social media API – that is, a single API that aggregates raw data from dozens of different social media publishers – instead of making connections to each one of those dozens of social media APIs individually. And in the social media API market, there is only a small handful of companies for you to choose from. We are one of them and we would love to work with you. But we know that you’ll probably want to shop your options before making a decision, so we’d like to offer our advice to help you understand some of the most important factors in selecting a social media API provider.
Here are some good questions for you to ask every social media API solution you consider (including your own internal engineers, if you’re considering hiring them for the job):
Are your data collection methods in compliance with all social media publishers’ terms of use?
–> Here’s why it matters: by working with a company that violates any publisher’s terms of use, you risk unstable (or sudden loss of) access to violated publisher’s data — not to mention the potential legal consequences of using black market data in your product. Conversely, if you work with a company that has a strong relationship with the social media publishers, our experience shows that you not only get stable, reliable data access, but you just might get rewarded with *extra* data access every now and then. (In case you’re wondering, Gnip’s methods are in compliance with each of our social media publishers’ terms of use.)
Do you provide results and allow parameter modifications via API, and do you maintain those API connections over time?
–> In our experience, establishing a single API connection to collect data from a single publisher isn’t hard. But! Establishing many API connections to various social media publishers and – this is key – maintaining those connections over time is really quite a chore. So much so, we made a whole long list of API-related difficulties associated with that integration work, based on our own experiences. Make sure that whoever you work with understands the ongoing work involved and is prepared to maintain your access to all of the social media APIs you care about over time.
How many data sources do you provide access to?
–> Even if you only want access to Twitter and Facebook today, it’s a good idea to think ahead. How much incremental work will be involved for you to integrate additional sources a few months down the line? Our own answer to this question is this: using Gnip’s social media API, once you’re set up to receive your first feed from Gnip via API, it takes about 1 minute for you to configure Gnip to send you data from a 2nd feed. Ten minutes later, you’re collecting data from 10 different feeds, all at no extra charge. Since you can configure Gnip to send all of your data in one format, you only need to create one parser and all the data you want gets streamed into your product. You can even start getting data from a new social media source, decide it’s not useful for your product, and replace it with a different feed from a different source, all in a matter of seconds. We’re pretty proud that we’ve made it so fast and simple for you to receive data from new sources… (blush)… and we hope you’ll find it to be useful, too.
What format is your data delivered in?
–> Ten different social media sources might provide data in 10 different formats. And that means you have to write 10 different parsers to get all the data into your product. Gnip allows you to normalize all the social media data you want into one single format — Activity Streams — so you can collect all your results via one API and feed them into your product with just one parser.
Hope this helps! If you’ve got additional questions to suggest for our list, don’t hesitate to drop us a note. We’d love to hear from you.
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