Los Angeles — In a surprising move to keep pace with the growing rivalry among social sphere, micro-blogging outfit Twitter has just snaffled up a startup social media analytics and data company, Hotspots.io for an unknown amount of money on Monday, according to a splash page on its website.
Currently, there is not much information available on Hotspots.io, but the company, which promotes itself as delivering “social media intelligence you actually use,” seems to still be in beta mode and its Web site lacks much in the way of product details.
In fact, the acquisition is evidently a pure “acqui-hire” as the team mentions that it will be working on developing analytics tools for Twitter’s advertising and publishing partners. The Hotspots.io team, which will be teaming up with Twitter’s “revenue engineering team,” includes Matt Huang, Alexander Spicer and Ashutosh Singhal. All three have altered their bio on Twitter to reflect their new jobs at the micro-blogging site.
However, there is a demo posted on how the company measures the social-media influence of SuperBowl ads. As for the ads, the company peeked in to the amount of Twitter mentions, total social reach, and the amount of money disbursed on advertising from big name companies such as Coca-Cola, H&M, and Anheuser-Busch to see if their marketing efforts paid off.
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Anyway, viewing the image above, it appears that the company places great emphasis on ‘social media intelligence you will actually use’. Besides, the company’s analysis of this year’s Super Bowl commercials is absolutely awesome.
Below is the announcement posted on the Hotspots.io website:
We’re incredibly excited to announce that Twitter has acquired the Hotspots.io team!
Starting today, we’ll be joining up with Twitter’s revenue engineering team where our focus will be on developing analytics tools for Twitter’s advertising and publishing partners.
We founded Hotspots.io with the vision of helping companies and individuals maximize their social media ROI through actionable and accessible analytics, and we’re thrilled to be able to continue that work on a much larger scale at Twitter.
A Twitter representative confirmed the acquisition.
The micro-blogging outfit has also recently acquired shortform blogging platform Posterous, internet security company Dasient and social summary tool Summify. The future of the Hotspots.io product is unclear as of yet, but according to industry analysts predicting that it will be shuttered as it looks like Twitter was after the talent.