We’ve rolled out a pretty exciting release in the last few minutes that focuses on the Referral System.
Referral Page Changes
First, your referral page has a better breakdown of referral information.
We are really excited about this… The “possible referees” page lists people that follow you, but are not yet in our system. These people have the best income-generating potential for you via referral payouts.
Referral API
The “possible referees” feature is definitely awesome, but we did not stop there. There are thousands of third-party Twitter developers out there and we want to give those developers a way to monetize their applications. Thus, we are releasing an API that allows you to query our system to get information about Tweeters and become referrers for advertisers that may want to sponsor them.
If you have a site that shows Twitter users in some capacity to visitors, such as a Twitter user rating site where people are constantly coming to check their rating, or perhaps you’ve added Twitter comments to your blog posts, then this API is for you!
You simply gather up a list of Twitter user names, or ids, and pass that to us and we return information to you. For instance:
If the person is in our system, we send back information about them… How much they charge, how many times they’ve been fav’d, third-party scores and grades on them, etc. Included in this data is a special link to their profile page. This link is important because, with this, you can link a visitor at your site to hire that Tweeter. This results in a new Advertiser that you are the referrer for, and as you know, if you refer an advertiser, you earn a percentage of any money they spend in the system.
If the Tweeter is not in our system, you can use your referral link to try to get them to sign up, thus, becoming their referrer.
For more information on the Referral API, please see the SponsoredTweets API page.
Branding for the Referral API
If you use the Referral API to direct people to a Twitter user’s profile, you have the opportunity to brand that page with your logo. On the API page there is an area that allows you to point to an image that will be your logo.
Then, when someone clicks through your referral link, the landing page will look like:
We point to an image that you host so that you can use your analytics program to measure traffic you are generating.
Bug Fixes
We’ve squashed a lot of bugs in this release as well, to name a few:
- Many errors that people had submitting their tweets have been addressed.
- Advertisers should see improvements when making offers to a large amount of people at once.
- Many other issues.
