DataSift , which taps and structures data from social networks to provide more insights into it, has added a new partner to its own network. The company has linked up with LinkedIn — the social network for the working world with 467 million users that was acquired by Microsoft recently for $26.2 billion — to help develop a stronger marketing profile for LinkedIn by parsing its public data. The deal is part of a bigger push to grow advertising on the social network.
More specifically, together, LinkedIn and DataSift are planning to tap content shared and discussed in LinkedIn’s public timelines to build up more data about how LinkedIn is used and what is talked about on there, which in turn will be fed into larger insights that DataSift creates for marketers to help them manage and spend ad budgets.
This is part of a bigger shift for the startup, which was founded in 2010 out of the U. K. and has raised $72 million. DataSift made a name for itself originally as one of two companies that had access to Twitter’s “firehose” of data — essentially the full stream of public tweets — which it then structured and resold to marketers and others who were turning to Twitter for real-time sentiment and insights on a number of topics.
That relationship changed some time after Twitter acquired GNIP (the other firehose partner) and eventually cut off DataSift. Before and after that development, though, DataSift inked deals with Tumblr and Facebook to tap their networks to provide more marketing insights for brands and agencies, which needed more data in order to figure out if and how best to use those platforms for their marketing.
It’s DataSift’s deals with Tumblr and Facebook that are serving as templates for what LinkedIn plans to do. “I ncreasingly for us, the primary focus is the marketer,” said Tim Barker, DataSift’s CEO. “All networks have focused their efforts to serve marketers, and we have too.” (Which for us consumers is possibly a worrying trend, but that may be a subject for another piece.
