Salesforce secures Twitter feed

Salesforce and Twitter have announced today a global alliance that will see Twitter push out its 400 million public tweets a day to Salesforce's Radian6 customers.

The agreement formalises a three-year relationship between the two firms, which delivers tweets to Radian6 in real-time, instead of Radian6 trawling to obtain them. It's about enabling swift and complete capture of the tweets, according to Salesforce Radian6 vice president of marketing, Rob Begg, who was down in Sydney, for the company's Cloudforce event.

"You can't miss a tweet when someone's looking for help on service," he said.

Other sources feeding into Radian6's social sentiment are captured using various methods, including RSS feeds and trawling. But since tweets are sent at such a fast rate, it was necessary for information from Twitter to reach Radian6 quickly — hence the agreement.

"I don't think people would see it as a best-effort timescale sort of thing," Begg said.

Companies use Radian6, which draws information from a number of sources, including blogs, forums, Twitter and Facebook, to judge sentiment of their brand around product launches and campaigns and to respond to customers that have service issues. They choose keywords, geographies and preferred social mediums to filter what their customers are saying, putting issues into queues for the right people to handle.