Salesforce.com gets access to Twitter's messages feed

IDG News Service - Salesforce.com announced Wednesday a deal with Twitter that will give the enterprise cloud computing company access to Twitter's "firehose" feed of public messages, it said Tuesday.

The global deal will provide customers of Salesforce Radian6 more than 400 million messages on Twitter generated daily, which they can analyze to gain customer insight, fuel engagement, and build brand identity, Salesforce.com said in a statement.

Radian6 is Salesforce.com's social media monitoring and engagement tool. Salesforce.com acquired Radian6, whose technology tracks conversations on social sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, last year.

Salesforce.com has been trying to strengthen its social media offering to its customers. It said earlier this month it was acquiring social media marketing firm Buddy Media, which delivers targeted marketing content through Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube, in a US$689 million cash and stock deal.

Competitor Oracle announced last month that it is acquiring Vitrue which helps corporations disseminate their messages and advertising across social media platforms, such as Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube and Google+.

The terms of the deal between Salesforce.com and Twitter were not disclosed.

Twitter already has some companies like Gnip that use its firehose of messages to provide data to enterprises. Dataminr, a social media data company in New York city, said in April it had signed a partnership with Twitter, which includes access to the full Twitter firehose in real-time.