Historic Twitter data opens to brands

The tool mines Twitter information back to January 2010. Developers Datasift say the service supplements real-time data analytics from their existing services, with historical data, to see how the Twittersphere reacts to information in real time or how it reacted in the past.

The tool can aggregate Twitter data for social media monitoring services, and has business intelligence and CRM applications.

Example applications could include trend analysis, point-of-sale correlations to test consumer sentiment, feedback on marketing campaigns, trends and indicators for financial or economic events, or research around news or current affairs.

Tweets are mined for sentiment, topics, web-links, location and social media influence, and then analysed to generate meaningful insights.

Rob Bailey, DataSift chief executive, said: "The sheer volume of data being produced by Twitter represents a huge challenge for companies trying to extract insights from past events.

"Historics solves this problem, providing businesses with a platform to intelligently filter and extract meaning from two years of Twitter data. Demand is so strong, almost 1,000 companies – including 100 of the Fortune 500 companies – have already joined the wait list for Historics."

Twitter recently passed 500 million active users, and will celebrate its sixth birthday later this year.

Nick Halstead, DataSift founder and head of technology, developed the Tweetmeme buttons common on websites.

He said Historics would simplify data from the large quantities available.

Halstead said: "With Historics, we are now democratising the Big Data industry to enable entrepreneurs and enterprises to easily create socially intelligent applications. No data scientists required, no Hadoop expertise needed."

This article was first published on marketingmagazine.co.uk