DataSift adds WordPress for richer social feedback

Much is made these days about gleaning valuable business information from social media. This can be particularly valuable to business marketing departments as it can often be a source of direct end user opinions and sentiment about a product, technology or brand. Getting that information is, however, not easy to do without help.

One company specialising in that specific field is US-based DataSift. It has developed a platform which provides businesses with curated, unified access to multiple social media sources including Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram and bitly.

Now the company has added another string to that bow by establishing a global partnership with Automattic, the company behind the widely used WordPress blogging and website building system.

This should give businesses enhanced capabilities at curating information about their products and brands, extracting value from the social and web content uploaded by real end users. DataSift has also added a separate feed for IntenseDebate, a commenting system averaging 1 million activities per day across WordPress and other content management platforms such as Google’s Blogger and Tumblr.

Through the DataSift platform, business users will have curated access to the full content of Automattic's public data, including posts and comments on WordPress.com, as well as content from externally hosted WordPress blogs and websites powered by Jetpack.

It provides rich filtering capabilities that enable users to add context to the data by providing more than 50 unique fields to search on, along with keyword targeting in post titles, body text, tags, categories, comments and links. Users can also define minimum comment count thresholds or listen for key bloggers and influencers by username.

In addition, DataSift claims its platform is the only one to provide the data output for posts including tags and categories applied by bloggers, providing even more context to the data.

The WordPress partnership provides a wealth of new content to the DataSift platform, both in social media terms and both consumer-oriented and B2B online destinations, such as key influencers like the analyst community. It currently powers an estimated 20 percent or more of web sites globally, comprising more than 73 million sites producing more than 35 million new posts every month, with roughly as many comments and likes. WordPress is a key data source for any enterprise interested in understanding the web presence of a brand or industry as well as to capture sentiment and build deeper relationships.

Using the platform enables companies to integrate social data into their applications for more easily than by hand-crafting the information sources, making it more readily available to inform analysis and decision-making.

“By most measures, WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system. Adding this massive source of data to our platform advances DataSift’s mission to help companies understand the voice of their customers and the preferences of the marketplace,” said Rob Bailey, CEO of DataSift. “Real-time social engagement gives brands an incredible opportunity to capture and analyse consumer attitudes and behaviours, and then shift business strategy to take advantage of that feedback.”