Salesforce.com connects to Twitter 'firehose'

Twitter sells daily tweets to Salesforce to dissect for social media analysis

Salesforce.com and Twitter have announced a ‘global strategic alliance' to connect Salesforce's Radian6 social media monitoring platform to Twitter's ‘firehose' of public tweets.

The deal will enable Radian6 subscribers to analyse more than 400 million tweets that are generated every day on Twitter. The deal is specifically intended to enable Radian6 customers to monitor comments made about them on the social media network.

"The alliance between Twitter and Salesforce.com enables companies to apply the power of social listening and engagement to over 400 million tweets daily, providing opportunities for social enterprises to engage, solve problems, gain followers and build brand identity," said Marcel LeBrun, senior vice president and general manager of Salesforce Radian6.

The deal is the first that Twitter has struck granting access to all public tweets to an analysis company. Previous deals, with Gnip and Dataminr, for example, have only included a sampling of tweets - not the whole lot.

Subscribers could use the service, added Jana Messerschmidt, vice president of business development at Twitter, to respond directly to consumers. "Combining the power of Salesforce Radian6 with Twitter helps companies understand and respond to their customers as these conversations are happening," she said.

The full terms of the deal - including the means by which Twitter and Radian6 will exchange the data - were not disclosed. However, Twitter has worked with Radian6 in the past, most notably to analyse the data generated by a ‘town hall' Twitter meeting with US President Obama last year.

Radian6 was one of a number of acquisitions that Salesforce made in late 2011 and early 2012. It acquired Radian6 for $326m (£210m) in March 2011, web conferencing company Dimdim for $31m (£20m) in January 2012, Ruby cloud platform Heroku for $212m (£135m) in December 2011 and contact management company Etacts, also in December 2011, for an undisclosed sum.

More recently, Salesforce acquired social marketing company Buddy Media for $689m (£445m).