Twitter Acquires Social Analytics Startup Hotspots.io

Hotspots.io, a startup promising to deliver “social media intelligence that you’ll actually use”, just announced on its home page that it has been acquired by Twitter.

It looks like Hotspots was still in private beta, and as a result, the site doesn’t have any product details. However, you can see one example of the analytics in-action through the data the company released after the Superbowl, showing the impact of different TV ads on Twitter, showing the total social media reach compared to the amount spent.

Then again, the details of the Hotspots product may not matter, since it sounds like Twitter is more interested in hiring the team (specifically to help with revenue) than acquiring the technology. Here’s how the Hotspots founders described the deal:

We’re incredibly excited to announce that Twitter has acquired the Hotspots.io team!

Starting today, we’ll be joining up with Twitter’s revenue engineering team where our focus will be on developing analytics tools for Twitter’s advertising and publishing partners.

We founded Hotspots.io with the vision of helping companies and individuals maximize their social media ROI through actionable and accessible analytics, and we’re thrilled to be able to continue that work on a much larger scale at Twitter.

I’ve emailed Hotspots.io and Twitter for more details and will update if I hear back.

Update: A Twitter spokesperson just emailed me to confirm the deal: “We’re excited that the team at Hotspots.io is joining Twitter to work on the revenue engineering team.”

Crunchbase

• TWITTER

Company: Twitter

Website: twitter.com

Launch Date: March 21, 2006

Funding: $1.16B

Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.

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