DataSift adds new partnership and data sources

Datasift has announced a partnership with Tableau as well as three new social data sources

DataSift is a social data platform which enables companies to aggregate, filter and extract insights from social media. Through its partnership with analytics and visualisation provider Tableau, DataSift customers will be able to integrate social data with business data, creating new insights on customers.

The two companies are demonstrating the integration at LeWeb’13 today and tomorrow, with real-time social analytics displayed at kiosks located throughout the event. Together with Tableau, DataSift will power social media dashboards to provide insight into all social data surrounding LeWeb’13, and the companies will also monitor speakers and news from the event.

Bringing business intelligence and social data together

“The ability to capture insights on markets and customers is critical to all enterprises,” says Elissa Fink, chief marketing officer at Tableau. “DataSift’s ability to capture social data across networks and millions of sources integrated with Tableau gives companies and brands more insight into exactly who their customers are, what they’re interested in and how best to engage them.”

Speaking to Tech City News, DataSift founder and CTO Nick Halstead says the company’s partnership with Tableau will make it easier than ever for customers to understand data: “This will change the reach of where social data goes. Instead of social data just being a silo’d part of the business, you can start to think about how social data joins up with your other data sets within the business. You’ll be able to make a dashboard that shows web traffic and social data on one page, which has never before been possible, as no company had access to both data sets.

“By bringing our two companies together, we’ll be able to teach and show the market how business intelligence and social can work together. We’ll do all the heavy lifting, bringing together hundreds of disparate APIs and hiding the complexities of the different licensing models. You’ll be able to get deep insights into the data from multiple data sets at once.”

Halstead adds that the market is still in its infancy. By bringing together business and social analytics is a compelling proposition for larger firms: “We’ve only reached less than one per cent of the potential market. Enterprise is where the big scale is, and this new proposition will create many exciting possibilities to link with your customer list, point-of-sale data and sales numbers. Every bit of data can be checked against the impact on social and correlated to the effect it has on your bottom line.”

New data sources

DataSift has also announced three new social data sources for its platform: Facebook Pages, Instagram and Google+.

Most large enterprises have many different Facebook pages which promote individual products, brands, communities and market segments. DataSift’s new Facebook Pages stream will provide companies with the ability to have a single view of all company pages, in order to better monitor posts, comments, likes and social activity.

“The problem with data sources like Facebook is that they don’t have a firehose for data access,” explains Halstead. “We have solved this problem to allow enterprises to have their own company-specific views of these important social networks. You can give us your access tokens and we’ll do the heavy lifting of adding the sources for you. We’re joining more data together.”

DataSift, founded in 2010, now collects in the region of 1.5 billion social items a day for customers from hundreds of APIs and social feeds. Halstead believes that analysing social data will become an integral part of every business in the future: “In three years, social data will be no more special than web analytics or any other type of data coming into the business.

“Of course, the problem with social is its scale: you can’t just go to Twitter and analyse 500 million tweets every day – you need a platform like ours to cut through the complexities of the data. We’re here to help customers get to grips with the data, helping to contextualise it so that it means something.”

You can catch Nick Halstead’s talk at LeWeb at 16.45 today. He will be talking about the evolution of the sharing economy, from the early days of RSS and TweetMeme to the prominence of social now, and give his insight into the future of sharing in a social-driven world.