Twitter has launched a new 'Official Partner Program', designed to help businesses find the best qualified third party assistance for their Twitter campaigns and management. From Twitter's official announcement, the new program will aim to link businesses with assistance to help them:
- Increase campaign performance by helping to scale, manage and measure performance to achieve desired objectives
- Gain more insight by using Twitter data to measure brand performance and identify relevant marketing and consumer trends
- Market more efficiently by managing social presence and oversee customer care
These are listed amongst various other objectives.
Twitter says it will be bringing together strategic partners from its Certified Program and its Marketing Platform Partner program whom they've recognized "because of their high-quality products or expert-level services and proven success on Twitter." Twitter also announced their first partner for the program - IBM.
"IBM is the first solutions provider that provides strategic insight, consulting and analytics to help brands and enterprises make decisions with Twitter data. Twitter and IBM have worked to train more than 10,000 IBM employees on Twitter data and analytics best practices."
Twitter and IBM have been working together since October 2014, with Twitter data being incorporated into IBM's Watson analytics platform to further enhance the system's automated learning capabilities and provide more nuanced, in-depth insight.
The IBM partnership underlines the growing relevance of social media and social media data. Rather than simply using Twitter's fire hose to build social sentiment into the mix, IBM is seeking to build in-depth analytics, data that can be used to inform enterprise decisions. In the official announcement, IBM's Glenn Finch, Leader of Big Data and Analytics at the tech giant, said:
"We believe in the transformative power of Twitter data for businesses, and are excited to be a Twitter Official Partner. With our deep industry and technology expertise, we're prepared to help the modern enterprise capture the knowledge of social data and turn it into actionable results."
Further info on Twitter's new partner program can be found on the official website, and you can search for partners at their newly created 'Find a Partner' page.