According to MediaBistro, Twitter’s 225 million active users send some 500 million tweets each day. That’s a lot of content. More importantly, it’s a lot of noise that marketers need to sift through in order to get to valuable data that can be used for campaigns, customer service, and other insights.
Social listening is a great way to find out what matters to your audience. It is a particularly effective way to help you determine where your next customer will come from and to gather insights that will help you better reach and serve those customers. It’s also a great way to see what is being discussed within your industry, and it’s a great way to keep an eye on the competition. The challenge, as mentioned earlier, is being able to sift through the massive amounts of noise and pick out the data that really matters.
Last week IBM announced a new partnership with Twitter. This is great news for businesses as well as for marketers who want to be able to take the mass of unstructured data from Twitter and better understand it. Twitter will share its data with IBM for integration with IBM’s enterprise solutions, including the Watson cloud platform. This might give businesses the ability to make better decisions, since they can now analyze trends via tweets posted worldwide and see how those trends relate to their customers and the markets they serve.
According to IBM’s press release, the collaboration will focus on three areas:
Integration of Twitter data with IBM analytics cloud based services
The new partnership will give IBM access to Twitter’s data stream by selected cloud based services, including IBM Watson Analytics. This will give businesses a better handle on data from tweets posted on Twitter. Clients will now be able to filter the data based on geography, public biographical information, and emotions expressed in tweets. Kind of interesting, isn’t it?
According to Twitter, “this relationship will enable IBM solutions – like the famous computer Watson – to access Twitter data as an input for multi-variable, pattern-dependent questions like “What do customers like best about my products?” or “Why are we growing quickly in Brazil?”
IBM and Twitter will deliver a set of enterprise applications
With the goal of improving business decisions across various professions and industries, the first joint solution will integrate Twitter data and IBM Experience One customer engagement solutions. This will give sales, marketing, and customer service people the ability to map sentiments and behavior for better engagement and support for their customers and clients.
Specialized enterprise consulting
IBM Global Business Services consultants will have access to Twitter data that will help enrich consulting services for clients across businesses. IBM and Twitter will collaborate to develop unique solutions for specific industries, focusing on the enterprise sector.
The partnership makes sense, since IBM wants to be able to provide its customers as many data sources as possible. IBM also wants to sell its services and products, and offering up something of value like this naturally opens the door to other relationships and opportunities. Twitter will benefit by being able to offer increased value to enterprise customers beyond what they now offer, specifically social media monitoring and tools for communication and promotion. While Twitter is still one of the largest social media platforms, its growth has been slowing and the way long time users use the platform has definitely changed. For many, Twitter has become a news channel or a distribution channel, not so much an engagement channel. This new partnership with IBM could just be a catalyst to help jump start growth again.
Only time will tell if this is going to be a tech marriage made in heaven. We will be watching how this new partnership develops. Definitely something worth looking into if you’re in the enterprise space and/or if you serve clients in the enterprise space and want to poke around a little here and see what they can really deliver.
More resources on this topic:
Changing the way business decisions are made
Simplifying The Data-Analysis Process for Untrained Businesses
photo credit: ibmphoto24 via photopin cc
IBM Partners with Twitter: What That Means for Marketers is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency