I couldn’t tell you much about what goes on in a Superbowl (I assume it’s a huge catering event) but whatever it is, I do know that people enjoy talking about it. A lot. Over 30 million mentions of the event were racked up online, nearly three times the volume achieved in 2012. So it’s little wonder that Twitter have swooped down on start-up BlueFin Labs, and purchased the social TV analytics company for a heftier sum than any other prior acquisition.
BlueFin hadn’t originally intended to sell so early, but failure to break into many of the large brands has made this opportunity too attractive to turn down. And the motivations for Twitter are simple. Advertisers are willing to make a punt on the world’s second largest social network for now, but this blind faith won’t continue for much longer unless they can begin to provide clear ROI metrics that brands can understand.
So in an attempt to achieve $1 billion in advertising revenue this year, Twitter are acquiring BlueFin labs in the hope that information such as the above can be used to help advertisers justify increasingly large spends. You can find out more about this “special connection” between Twitter and television on the Twitter blog.
