Datasift Expands Its Reach With New Pulsar Deal To Make Facebook Topic Data Bigger

Datasift, which has raised a total of $77.9 million to date, is partnering with social analytics platform Pulsar to make anonymized Facebook topic data available to any brands, government, charities and businesses. Last year Datasift did a Secondary Market raise of $6.2M from Upfront Ventures. This new deal shows Datasift is pushing hard to become a mainstay of the ad agency world.
Because Datasift is the exclusive provider of Facebook topic data, this new partnership with Pulsar means businesses can access Facebook topic data and conduct research through social media. What this means is that means that the realm of social data just got bigger. The whole area is now coming into its own as agencies will be able to add it to their bank of knowledge on how social media can prove its ROI in an advertising and marketing driven online world.
So why is Facebook topic data important? Well, it anonymously shows marketers what content audiences are sharing on topics which are relevant to their brands, plus the demographics of the people engaging around them on the world’s largest social platform (remember, this is about 1.44 billion MAUs). There are over 60 ‘targets’ to sample data against.
This partnership provides Pulsar’s clients with access to anonymous and aggregated content data about the activities, events, brands and topics people are sharing on Facebook, via Datasift’s platform. Pulsar’s social analytics platform lets companies map brand audiences, assess how content spreads and engage with people on social media.

The caveat to this deal however is that Facebook topic data is a different proposition to other sources of social data and agencies and platforms still have to work get used to using them. It is to be hoped that Pulsar can make this process easier, because it’s still possible to use all this data in quite a naïve manner. It still requires thought, experimentation and planning by agencies and their brands. So it’s not a magic bullet, but it is a potentially powerful one, if used wisely.
That said, Pulsar has got to market early with this integration with Datasift, so it’s ‘ahead of the pack’ compared to its competitors.
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