IBM announces Twitter database analytics tools

IBM and Twitter introduced industry-first cloud services that enable business professionals and developers to extract valuable information from Twitter data. In the course of the project, IBM and Twitter worked closely with more than 100 customers, and today they provide corporate customers with the opportunity to use social data to make business decisions.

Twitter is unlike any other data source in the world, representing a global information platform for dialogue on a wide variety of topics in real time. In order to use Twitter data to make important decisions, business professionals must do more than analyze public opinion — they must distinguish signal from noise. IBM helps achieve this by enriching and analyzing Twitter data in conjunction with millions of data sources from other information flows, such as weather forecasts, sales, inventory control. This approach allows you to find important relationships that help make more informed decisions.

“Making business decisions is largely dependent on internal data, such as sales, promotion, and inventory information. Now, with data from Twitter, customer feedback can easily be factored into business decision making, ”said Chris Moody, vice president of data strategy at Twitter. “The unique capabilities that IBM offers help organizations harness this valuable data.” We expect rapid growth in demand for new services in the retail, telecommunications and financial sectors, as well as other sectors of the economy. ”

IBM's new cloud-based analytics services will enable businesses and developers to:

• Build social data-compatible applications: developers and entrepreneurs can find, study, and retrieve rich content from Twitter by collecting information through IBM Insights for Twitter service on Bluemix.
• Combine predictive analytics with Twitter data: automating data curation, predictive analytics and visual storytelling; Watson Analytics tools can provide business professionals with the ability to immediately embed Twitter data in any project with the goal of identifying and explaining the hidden features and relationships needed to understand ongoing and future processes.
• Easily integrate Twitter data: With individual BigInsights on Cloud cluster configurations with integrated Twitter data access, customers can combine Twitter feeds with the full-featured Enterprise Hadoop-as-a-Service offering, also available on the IBM Bluemix platform.
• More than 4,000 IBM employees now have access to Twitter data and training to enrich the data with the analytical capabilities of IBM solutions and cloud services.

IBM and Twitter offer businesses great business decision-making by combining Twitter data with IBM analytic tools to extract valuable information. Collaboration with over 100 clients has identified three key trends:

1. In the global economy, we still remain geographic dependent. Different regions may show different levels of customer churn in the same market segment with identical data history.

Most telecommunications and media companies that are experiencing an outflow of subscribers have developed sophisticated analytical models to understand and predict customer turnover. The only insufficiently studied area is the influence of weather and other factors on events occurring within a particular region. By combining Twitter data with weather information that directly affects service outages, IBM identifies the links between weather events, negative messages, and customer churn. In turn, by helping to analyze localized Twitter data combined with weather information, IBM provides an opportunity to significantly improve customer models (in some cases, up to 5%) to reduce subscriber churn.

2. The staff turnover in the retail sector directly affects the behavior of the most loyal customers. Everything that happens within the four walls of an enterprise often becomes public domain thanks to social networks. Closed doors are a thing of the past.

IBM analytic models have shown that consumers value (and discuss on Twitter) the relationships and relationships built with sales consultants. This is especially true of the catering industry, where the tastes and preferences of the client are especially important. As soon as these connections disappear, consumers express their opinion on Twitter, experiencing a feeling of loss and dissatisfaction with the fact that "you need to start all over again."
IBM studied Twitter data, as well as information about loyal customers and the financial performance of various stores and restaurants.

According to the results of the study, it was found that dissatisfaction with the turnover of staff directly affects sales, and the most loyal (and valuable) customers feel most unsatisfied. In one of the cases under consideration, 3.3% of the participants in the loyalty program, which unites 6 million customers, brought the largest profit to the organization and at the same time had the maximum impact on sales by making purchases online every day.

3. Due to the ability to obtain data on individual preferences of customers, Twitter is a source of information about increasing or decreasing demand among customers and provides a good picture of global trends.

Clothing manufacturers want to know what products and when to bring to the market, however, constantly changing trends in the retail industry and the behavior of customers complicate the task and pose certain barriers to enterprises. According to IBM, Twitter is an important indicator of clothing market demand. Using psycholinguistic analysis tools from IBM Research to identify the full range of psychological, cognitive and social characteristics of customers based on Twitter data, and combining this information with sales data and market share, manufacturers can better understand the reasons for the increase or decrease in sales. They can also improve product promotion strategies and contribute to the development of future products.

“The IBM-Twitter partnership helps businesses analyze billions of interactions between social media users and make smarter decisions,” said Glenn Finch, Head of Big Data & Analytics, IBM Global Business Services. “By combining it with unique expertise and valuable insights, Twitter data now provides the ability to transform decision-making processes within organizations.”