Twitter's firehose of data is about to meet a tsunami from Facebook.
After announcing its news reader app, Paper, on Thursday, Facebook has also announced that it will begin to publish anonymized data about its 1.23 billion active users through a new program called Chatter.
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In partnership with social media television analytics firm SecondSync, Facebook will release a study entitled "Watching With Friends" that will detail how television shows are discussed on the site, along with breakdowns on demographics and other metrics.
“TV-related discussion on Facebook is fascinating and something that all our clients are interested in understanding," Andy Littledale, managing director of SecondSync, said in a blog post. "We’re very excited about this partnership and the opportunity to provide an additional perspective on social TV behavior that draws on Facebook’s rich demographics and broad reach."
The blog post also stated that Chatter data will be available to clients through SecondSync later in 2014.
Television data is an area that has been dominated by Twitter. The microblogging service has formed partnerships, including a deal with Nielsen to create a specialized social media TV ratings system.
Twitter disclosed in its IPO that it made $47.5 million from selling data — a small number compared to its advertising revenue. But it's a space that is ripe for growth with few other players.
Facebook's entry into the data market would create competition in a space that Twitter has dominated with relative ease. Twitter has the ability to generate reams of data for analysis, but Facebook could dwarf that. Twitter has about 200 million active users, which would come in at about 16% of Facebook's active user count.
Social media-generated data is also beginning to expand beyond television ratings. Twitter announced a partnership with CNN and Dataminr on Wednesday to analyze tweets in an effort to spot breaking news moments in real time.
Facebook's data generating capabilities may not be that advanced yet, but they do provide a road map for future endeavors. With marketers already highly invested in Facebook and beginning to explore real-time marketing, it is not a stretch to imagine Facebook providing the opportunity to use its vast data troves to deliver perfectly timed, situationally aware ads.
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