Content Volume Management and Rate-Limits

The Experience Platform utilizes APIs (Application Protocol Interfaces) to retrieve publicly available content from Social Networks like Twitter and Instagram. Since there are many systems, platforms, and applications that request data from social networks, each network has limits on how many times a particular user can request content in a given time period. This is what is referred to as a Rate-Limit. An API request can be thought of as a single operation the Cheetah Experiences performs to pull in publicly available content from a social network, such as asking Twitter for the latest Tweets containing the hashtag #backtoschool.

Each social network has different rates at which users can pull content, and if too much content is requested in a given time period, they will no longer allow new requests until the time period has passed (typically an hour). This means that your feeds could go offline if they encounter rate-limiting.

We have provided a few ways for you and your team to manage feeds to reduce the risk of getting rate-limited and to receive content at a frequency that best suits your marketing needs.

Types of Feeds and their Use Cases

On the feed settings page, you can select if you want to set up your feed as a Standard feed or a Daily feed. You can also put either type of feed into Live Mode for 24 hours by selecting the Live Mode option on the bottom of the screen.

• Standard Feeds: This the most commonly used type of feed and are best for social walls on websites or in your apps. These feeds will start at a standard call rate but will begin to speed up or slow down depending on the amount of content matching your search. If no content matches the search for two months, an email will be sent to you and the feed will eventually be paused.
  
  
  • Use case: This type of feeds is great for brands with variable volumes of content throughout the year. Let's imagine that your brand focuses on cold drinks and spring and summer are therefore your main season. You may want to moderate customers' content a few times a day during your peak season and then slow down as the amount of content decreases. 

• Daily Feeds: Many of Cheetah Experiences's customers leverage social walls on evergreen pages that showcase events, products or influencers as a way to bring in fresh and relevant content but at a lower moderation frequency. Since content on these types of pages is only moderated once per day or even a couple of times a week, there is no reason to request content every few seconds. As there are less requests made for daily feeds, Wayin customers can have more of them without the risk of being rate-limited. 
  
  
  • Use case: This example is best suited for an evergreen social display on your website. Imagine that you want to showcase your customer's content and refresh it on a regular basis but there is no compelling event that would require the feed to search for content more frequently and you also don't want to moderate content more than once a day.
  • Limits for daily feeds: You can have a maximum of 50 daily feeds running concurrently. 

• Live Feeds: Each account can set a certain number of feeds into live mode to retrieve content as quickly as possible. It is recommended to use login credentials that have not been used on any other feeds to reduce the risk of getting rate-limited as the platform will be requesting content often. After 24 hours, the feed will go back to its previous rate (standard or daily rate).
  
  
  • Use case: Live feeds are used during live events such as conferences, concerts, shows and sports games, to be able to really quickly moderate time-sensitive content. Live feeds are not suited for longer-term use.
  • Limits for live feeds:  You can have a maximum of 10 live feeds running concurrently. There are also limits for the number of live feeds per social network per authorization token (OAuth token is unique for each user who authenticates the feeds): max 5 Twitter Live Feeds, max 3 Instagram Live Feeds, max 10 Facebook Live Feeds.

Rate limits per social network

There are limits on the platform defining how many feeds a single user can authenticate using the same token (the same social network credentials). To prevent rate-limiting from the social network, we recommend having feeds authorized with different credentials. Existing limits are below:

Tools to avoid rate-limiting

Warnings to Use New Credentials

Based on the rate-limits of a particular network and the number of times a feed has been authorized with the same credentials, the system will tell you if you should use new credentials when creating a new feed to reduce the risk of being rate-limited.

Set Date to Auto-Disable Feed

Part of reducing your risk of being rate limited is disabling feeds when they are no longer needed, but this can be challenging if you have a team of people creating feeds. When you are setting up your feed, you can set a date when the feed will be automatically paused.

• Go to the Feed Settings on any content or data feed
• In the End Date section, select the date you would like the feed paused

If you'd like further advice regarding this matter, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager who will be happy to provide guidance and additional best practices.