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DataSift brings social media tracking, filtering platform to U.S.

DataSift launches in the U.S. to use real-time social media data in order to monitor brands.
Written by Rachel King, Contributor

DataSift, a real-time data-filtering platform, is moving stateside to help businesses monitor just how their brand is doing when it comes to social media.

Essentially, DataSift's platform searches through user conversations on social media sites (just Twitter for the time being) to formulate business-related insights based on hundreds of millions of social media posts per day. The platform is also able to filter social media data by demographic information, online influence and sentiment.

Sentiments come into play thanks to a partnership with Lexalytics, so that DataSift can characterize and filter for the sentiment (positive or negative) of a tweet. Another partnership with Klout allows DataSift to filter and analyze Twitter results based on influence.

Furthermore, DataSift does not limit searches based on keywords. Companies of any size can opt to customize and define more complex filters, such as location, gender, sentiment, and language for more specific insights and analysis. DataSift’s platform technology can even be applied to picking out any content that is represented as a link within the post itself.

Actually, DataSift is one of only two companies in the world with a license to make Twitter data commercially available for non-display purposes, which enables customers to search for posts using metadata contained in Tweets.

Similarly, Twitter itself has tried to alleviate the problem many businesses complain about in which they don't understand how much traffic, and therefore the financial benefit, they’re receiving by using Twitter. That resolution started to come about with Twitter Web Analytics when it was unveiled in September.

Features on that particular platform including enabling site managers to see what content is driving the most traffic and most shared items, as well as tracking links to specified content.

In the coming months, DataSift will expand to cover other social media streams, including Facebook and Google Plus.

Originally founded by TweetMeme founder Nick Halstead and based in Reading, U.K, DataSift is setting up shop in San Francisco this week.

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