I wrote an application which allows users to create fantasy football player rankings online. When users create these rankings, they want the most recent data possible as injuries/arrests/etc happen often during the preseason. One way to provide up-to-the-minute data is to integrate tweets about players into the application. I have experimented with this but have found simply searching for player names using the Twitter API does not yield the best results as you get a lot of garbage and useless Tweets. I was thinking of making an offer to only certain Twitter users (beat writers, NFL news feeds, others that are reliable) whereby if they mention my Twitter username and the of the player in question (or that player's username) in the tweet I will post those tweets into my application for the respective player. This would: Make searching easier and faster as I would only have to search for my mentions which include a player name or player username Allow me to populate relevant and useful content into the application. Get some exposure through Twitter through many mentions Questions: Is this type of arrangement common? Would the ability to integrate their tweets into an application be enough motivation for prominent Twitter users to use this feature? Or would they need more incentive?
Cross promotion is very common on Twitter, though I haven't heard of anyone in an arrangement like this specifically. I think the incentive is going to depend on how large your user-base is, and if you can convince them that it will be beneficial to them