Dive Brief:

• Twitter Inc. acquired social data company Gnip in order to monitor what users are saying about companies and brands.

• Gnip gathers data on Twitter streams, capturing and analyzing posts on social networks using keywords and other data points.

• Twitter will harness Gnip’s operations for its own data platform and will provide its data to Gnip customers.

Dive Insight:

Twitter appears to be joining Pinterest and Instagram in its efforts to make its network more useful to companies, including retailers that are interested in effectively communicating with users who complain, praise, or otherwise show interest in certain brands. Social network users are often sensitive to changes like this, depending upon how they impact their use of it. Depending on how disruptive or invasive it seems, it’s possible that this could be an improvement that helps both users and retailers who want to communicate via Twitter.