Big Data in Practice

41 TWITTER How Twitter And IBM Deliver Customer Insights From Big Data

Background

Twitter is the world’s second-most-popular social network after runaway market leader Facebook, with 310 million users active each month. Since its launch as a “micro-blogging” site in 2006, it has also become very popular with businesses that have products and services to promote.

The San Francisco company employ nearly 4000 people and generated revenue of $436 million in the first quarter of 2015, but have never turned a profit – almost all of their users get the service for free, and the computer power and infrastructure needed to handle that many users doesn’t come cheap!

Last year, they announced that IBM would become their first partner in the Twitter Partnership Program, offering other businesses the chance to work with both Twitter and IBM to gain value from data and analytics.

What Problem Is Big Data Helping To Solve?

Twitter’s management know full well that their network needs to take a bigger share than the 0.84% it currently holds of the global online advertising market if the company want to become profitable. Around 88% of their revenues come from promoted tweets, which are messages companies pay to have appear in the Twitter feeds of users who are likely to be interested.

This has to pay the salaries of their thousands of staff, as well as the upkeep and maintenance of the huge computer network needed to keep the service running at no cost to the end user.

Twitter know they need ...