Top 5 Challenges and How to Overcome Them

At Ayrshare, we see every day how our customers are using social media technology to deliver great value to a variety of businesses, from creator platforms to content management systems. While using social media as an individual may be straightforward, integrating these platforms into your services via an API can be a complex and challenging task. In this article, we delve into the complex world of Social Media APIs, focusing on the challenges you may encounter and how to deal with them successfully.

Why do companies even need social media API access in the first place? Of course every company is different, but it usually comes down to two reasons:

• Marketing Content: Businesses often have compelling content (text, images, or videos) on their platforms and wish to enable users to edit and post this content to various social networks.
• Data Analytics: Companies are also looking to collect data for their users, such as fan counts, engagement metrics, and statistical information to make informed decisions.

Additional functions include managing comments, generating hashtags, or providing social media templates.

There are many types of companies that can benefit from the benefits of social media. Here are a few examples:

• Creators markets: Allowing creators to share and track posts for attribution.
• Content Management Systems: Aims to help users distribute content more efficiently.
• Productive AI applications: Provides text, images, or video creation.
• Architecture Platforms: Allows agents to post inventory on social media and receive detailed statistics on their social accounts.

We wrote an article on the top 10 social media APIs for developers where we examined each social network’s capabilities, integration difficulties, and helpful tips for getting started.

Here are the top three – see the article for those like YouTube API, LinkedIn API, and Google Business Profile API:

Facebook API and Instagram API

The Facebook Graph API – meaning the API is modeled on nodes and edges – is used by both the Facebook API and the Instagram API. These are two of the most popular social media platforms among Ayrshare customers. Developers often find the lack of complete documentation, few code examples, and API stability to be drawbacks.

The TikTok API

TikTok videos are one of the most popular types of posts, especially on creator forums. TikTok API is relatively new compared to other public APIs and they are continuously improving their API. Recent changes require significant code rewriting and a new domain verification process that takes 4-6 weeks to be approved.

The Twitter API, also known as the X API

The Twitter API, which we now refer to X APIit’s one of the oldest social media APIs and even after all the recent Twitter hub-bub, it still remains stable. Unfortunately, now you need to pay $5,000 or $42,000 per month X API access.

Are you ready to start building a public API? Before you fire up VS Code and document each API, there are a few top challenges you should be aware of before diving in.

1. Inconsistent Approval Processes

Every social network is different. Sure, Facebook and Instagram are both owned by Meta, but even then they might have very different names. If you consider that there are about 10 major social networks, it just turns on the navigation feature for each of those networks so that your users can post to them.

You might breeze through one process only to be stoned for some unknown reason on another network. Maybe LinkedIn is in your favor, but YouTube is not willing to budge on something that seems unreasonable. Even getting the proverbial car on the road is a distraction.

Because of this, many organizations that can and should provide social media features completely ignore them due to the challenges associated with obtaining these permissions in the first place.

For example, Facebook requires you to have an approved business, submit a video for integration, and fill out the justification for every permission (you’ll probably need a dozen). As with Apple’s program approval process, you should expect to be rejected several times over the course of several weeks.

2. Maintenance and Support

Maintaining social media API access is a high-stakes balancing act. It’s not just about publishing features, it’s also about enduring countless obstacles and maintaining a dedicated internal team. Typically this is built by up to 5 or more employees depending on the depth and breadth of the product’s API requirements.

According to Indeed, the average salary for a software engineer is $116k per year. Which means investing in a dedicated team to manage these connections is usually north of $500k and can easily break the seven figure range!

Unfortunately this means that small startups will have a very difficult time getting API access and as they may not have the resources available to dedicate to the endless process of resources.

3. Fighting Sudden Deadlines

Maintenance is essential for managing API connections. For example, if a social media network requires certain changes to allow posting and is ignored, a platform that fails to adapt before the statutory deadline may lose posting rights and have to start the process over to get them back.

This leads to losing all integration if changes are not followed. Naturally this is incredibly frustrating for API teams focused on social networking as it can feel like the rug has been pulled from under their feet.

LinkedIn and TikTok both recently modified their APIs with a short compliance deadline. If you didn’t make the changes and get approval in time, well, I think you’ll need to explain to your user why they can no longer use your social integration.

4. Incorrect Documents

Navigating through social media documents is like walking down a street. Oftentimes the documentation has little or no detail. After all, these social networking sites make money from their users. Their API to third parties is just an afterthought. Not only are the documents wildly inconsistent but they run to hundreds of pages. There may be thousands of topics with less and less depth in the information presented in the documents.

This means that developers have limited guidance if API documentation is not up to standard. Teams will experience unexpected difficulties when their preferred coding language is not written the way they wanted. This does not include troubleshooting issues entirely, which are relegated to social posts since social networks have little incentive to use resources dedicated to helping third parties maintain API access.

5. Economic Considerations

The price of social media API access varies but can be steep. Some platforms demand higher monthly fees with charges ranging from $5,000 to $42,000 per month, such as Twitter. This requires careful budgeting and adds another layer of complexity to an already knotty process.

Remember, this example only accounts for the cost of accessing X (formerly known as Twitter) and doesn’t even account for other potential costs.

As previously explained, fully functional teams managing these APIs will not be cheap and will not make economic sense unless social media is a critical business strategy.

The challenges of Social Media API integration are great but not insurmountable.

So how does Ayrshare make it easy? We’ve made it our business to handle all of this so our customers don’t have to.

Clients need to integrate the Ayrshare API and create a user-friendly endpoint. Once this is set up, you can enjoy the seamless social media features without facing the associated hassles.

Navigating the labyrinthine world of Social Media APIs can be challenging. However, with careful planning, adequate resources, and perhaps a specialized service like Ayrshare, you can harness the full potential of social media for your business.