Los Angeles – World’s popular microblogging outfit Twitter has forged an alliance with Datasift, a UK based business intelligence and analysis company in order to permit businesses to access every single tweet posted by a user going back two years to use for market research purposes.
Henceforth, businesses around the globe will be able to mine historical data on Twitter to discover long term trends dating back to January 2010 in order to devise marketing campaigns, target influential users or even try to predict certain events.
So far, only the previous 30 days of tweets were available for companies to search. Datasift, the social data application company has recently unfurled Historics, a cloud-computing platform that enables entrepreneurs and enterprises to extract business insights from Twitter’s public Tweets dating back to January 2010. Regular users can access posts from the past seven days.
Twitter is now monetizing its archive. Image Source: (The Telegraph)
“It is a brand new service that we are offering online-it is a vast technology challenge because of the amount of data that is picked out every single day,” Tim Barker, Datasift’s marketing manager, said in a statement to the BBC News.
More importantly, Datasift is just one of only two companies in the world authorized to make Twitter data commercially available for non-display purposes. DataSift offers brands and companies with granular insight into how they are perceived by social customers.
Barker also said that the service, which is priced at £635 a month for an entry level package, will empower businesses to “understand their customers thoroughly”.
“We now live in an era where brands are defined by what customers say and by accessing these tweets, companies can listen to their customers at large,” he said.
However, this is a really an essential move by Twitter. And it could have far reaching implications for us all. Though recently, the microblogging network Twitter has been desperately trying to monetize its business since it became popular in 2007. But its only asset is its data. Twitter owns the data–and it heavily restricts access to the gold mine through its api.
And according to Barker, who says that the company has been receiving approximately 250 million tweets on a daily basis. However, Datasift clarified that tweets posted then deleted on a personal profile would not be indexed by the company for research purposes.
The company also boasted that the demand for the service is escalating at rapid pace-with roughly 1000 companies waiting to get access to the tweets as soon as possible. Baker also said that this is the main reason Datasift had decided to go back two years as that was when Twitter “really became mainstream”.
By the way, through DataSift’s application, companies can mine and interpret vast-volumes of social data to help create insights for their business. For example:
- Social media monitoring companies can analyze trends in customer conversations and brand mentions;
- Business Intelligence companies can correlate point-of-sale data with social data to identify trends in product sales and market sentiment;
- Marketers can evaluate conversations around marketing campaigns and adjust key-messages and offers based on feedback;
- Financial organizations can analyze popular sentiment, trends and indicators relating to businesses and economic events;
- News and research organizations can surface new trends around historic and popular culture events.
The move has ignited concerns among privacy campaigners. But Baker said Twitter is a public social network, as there is no concern for privacy. He also said he had no idea whether the company will permit consumers to access their own tweets going back more than seven days anytime soon.
“It is incredibly difficult to store and serve that amount of data over long periods of time,” he explained.
“People have historically used Twitter to communicate with friends and networks in the belief that their tweets will quickly disappear into the ether,” argued Gus Hosein, executive director of Privacy International.
Justin Basini, chief executive of Allow, a personal data and privacy rights company, said: “Marketers will stop at nothing to get hold of your data. This move shows that all those throwaway tweets have suddenly become a rich new revenue stream for twitter, much in the same way that Facebook has monetized its offering. It has taken a stream of consciousness, analyzed it, canned it and sold it for a profit. And the worst thing is, you never knew it was going to happen. It just goes to show that online privacy is a rare thing indeed. We think that people should be allowed to have a greater say in who has access to their data and get a share of that data’s value.”
The new service launched by Datasift will also prove to be a vital source of revenue for Twitter. Datasift pays Twitter a syndication fee each time it licenses a tweet to a company. The relationship is not exclusive however, and other companies are expected to follow suit and offer increased access to users’ tweets.