Twitter Buys Tweetdeck – What Will They Do With It?
The rumors have been flying around for weeks about Twitter wanting to buy Tweetdeck and today over on the Twitter blog it has just been announced officially. Everybody knows it has been about to happen but the big question is what exactly does Twitter have planned for Tweetdeck going forward? Tweetdeck has always been used by power users (I love it myself) and it could be something that Twitter sees as part of it’s big overall magnetization plan. How will Twitter integrate the new service, how will existing users be affected by the purchase and are Twitter going to be able to make money from this?
What Do Twitter Say?
The guys at Twitter have been especially quiet but the blog post
This acquisition is an important step forward for us. TweetDeck provides brands, publishers, marketers and others with a powerful platform to track all the real-time conversations they care about. In order to support this important constituency, we will continue to invest in the TweetDeck that users know and love.
What Do Tweetdeck Say
The interesting thing about Tweetdeck is that it is a start up that has thrived outside of the USA and has been built with a small team over in London. As they say themselves on the blog…
It is precisely for this reason that Twitter has acquired TweetDeck. The mainstream Twitter user-base is well catered for by twitter.com and the official mobile clients. And by becoming part of the official platform, TweetDeck will now fill that role for brands, influencers, the highly active and anyone that just needs “more power”.
So What Is The Master Plan
It’s interesting to see that the word brands appears in the blog posts and it could herald something interesting coming from Twitter. Could we about to see a premium version of the site that brands and businesses could pay for? There are certainly a full dashboard of options that most brands could do with on Twitter that are not currently there. It will be interesting to see what happens to the current users and the amount of integration with other platforms like Facebook and Foursquare. You would imagine that Tweetdeck will be fully branded up and some of the other social networks might get removed. The integration will probably take a little time but this could finally be a clue about how Twitter is going to make money and have a deeper relationship with brands. If they are paying $50 million for something you would hope that they have a very good plan for it.
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