Although Twitter and Gnip have been partners for four years now, Twitter recently agreed to acquire Gnip, an acquisition that should equip Twitter with a more advanced social data analytics and enrichment system. Twitter aims to use Gnip to make Twitter analytics more accessible and useful to customers who use Twitter data to connect with customers, get news, and find trends.
What is Gnip?
Gnip is a major world player in social data providers. Gnip offers social analytics products that aggregate and enrich data from social networks in real time, that filter data based on specified limitations (such as geographical location or keyword matches), that correlate social data with business data, and more. Basically, Gnip can help companies access, organize, and enrich data to effectively use social media platforms for business.
Gnip has provided access to more than 2.3 trillion tweets to customers worldwide who use those tweets to gain insights into their industries and trends.
What does Twitter want with Gnip?
In an announcement on Twitter’s blog, Jana Messerschmidt, Twitter’s VP of Global Business Development & Platform, states that Twitter wants “to make […] data even more accessible” by “work[ing] directly with […] customers to get a better understanding of their needs.” To do that, Twitter will take on Gnip, a company that Twitter says “has played a crucial role in collecting and digesting our public data and delivering the most essential Tweets to partners.”
Messerschmidt explains Twitter’s plans to “offer more sophisticated data sets and better data enrichments, so that even more developers and businesses big and small around the world can drive innovation using the unique content that is shared on Twitter. [Twitter] will continue making our data available to Gnip’s growing customer base. And with the help of Gnip’s Boulder-based team, we will be extending our data platform — through Gnip and our existing public APIs — even further.”
The details of these plans are yet to come, but it sounds like Twitter analytics will be more in-depth and more accessible by acquiring Gnip.
Why do social media analytics matter?
Social media analytics are used to gain insights into a variety of industries and their target markets. Social analytics can give all kinds of brands, professionals, and institutions information that helps them “spot trends, analyze sentiment, find breaking news, connect with customers, and much more.” [source] Because a business professional can’t sit in front of Twitter all day to see what’s trending, how tweets are doing, or who’s talking about the company, social media analytics help pull that useful information together so that businesses and professionals can better serve their target audiences.
Want to read more about Twitter acquiring Gnip? Read the statements released on the Twitter blog and the Gnip blog.
Sources:
https://blog.twitter.com/2014/twitter-welcomes-gnip-to-the-flock
http://blog.gnip.com/
http://gnip.com/products/realtime/
http://gnip.com/products/enrichments/
http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/twitter-buys-gnip_b56434
Featured Image:
http://gnip.com/company/brand/
https://about.twitter.com/press/brand-assets
