There don’t seem to be many days that pass without Twitter (now known as X) being featured in the news – whether that’s a change to the way external content is displayed on the social media platform, deleting images and links of a certain age, or stopping free access to its API.
There’s a new change that is set to impact many Salesforce orgs; Twitter/X is revoking access to multiple public APIs – a change which is expected to come into effect as early as August 23, 2023, according to Salesforce’s recent update.
Cutting off the integration could impact some of the Salesforce services and features your user base benefits from every day – social login, surfacing social data in Salesforce, and some social posting features that marketers use. Here’s a list of what you need to investigate.
Sales Cloud
The Social Accounts, Contacts, and Leads feature will no longer connect to Twitter/X (although Classic UI customers can continue to connect to YouTube). This is the Lightning component that surfaces the social media profiles of the Account/Contact/Lead records that you’re currently viewing.
Workaround: To continue showing social profile data in the Salesforce UI, there could be third-party applications on the AppExchange to plug the gap.
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Formerly Pardot)
Posting to Twitter via the Social Posting feature will no longer work – and you will no longer be able to retrieve ongoing engagement statistics for posts already published. The Twitter connector will disappear from the Connectors section in Account Engagement settings.
Workaround: The unfortunate news is that there’s no solution that will enable you to post to Twitter via Account Engagement – this will need to be done manually from Twitter/X. To track prospect engagement straight to Account Engagement, you can manually create custom redirects (AKA marketing links) that rewrite your destination URL into a tracked link, and paste those into your Twitter/X post.
Experience Cloud
Social Sign On via Twitter/X is no longer available – not a dealbreaker for most people, however, it could be an annoyance for some of your external customer/partner users.
Workaround: There are three solutions that Salesforce propose in their Knowledge article, the most recommended being to create a new API client with Twitter/X. This should allow users to retain the link between their existing Twitter account and their user in Experience Cloud.
AppExchange Apps
Salesforce estimate that around 30 AppExchange apps will be impacted in functionality.
Source Code Repositories
As for the centralized location that development teams work with (containing files and more), those 350+ source code repositories that call out to Twitter/X public APIs will be impacted.
Marketing Cloud (Is Safe!)
The integrations between Twitter/X and Marketing Cloud will not be affected:
- Social Studio
- Advertising Studio
- Intelligence (formerly Datorama)
Summary
Well, that’s a curveball I’m sure many Salesforce professionals didn’t expect to be served this week! Luckily, Salesforce have sprung into action with some useful suggestions, while some services, sadly, cannot be resolved.
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