Twitter has established itself as more of a cultural meter than ever after partnering with IBM for a deal where information collected from tweets will be used to influence business decisions.
Data from the microblogging site, which is estimated to process a billion tweets every two days, will be culled so businesses can predict market trends and find out how consumers are responding to products and brands, Reuters reported.
IBM earlier announced a partnership with Apple, sealing a deal over the summer to load iPads and iPhones with applications for business clients.
"Here we are seeing an alignment of old tech and new tech companies. It is the second such deal that IBM has announced in the last couple months. They realize they don't have all the answers and a lot of other companies have asset offerings that can be matched well," said Scott Kessler, analyst at S&P Capital IQ in New York, as quoted by Reuters.
IBM plans to train 10,000 employees to work with businesses using Twitter data. The partnership is part of IBM's shift away from old school hardware and toward cloud and data analytics products.
Earlier this year, Twitter acquired Gnip, a social data provider that sorts through the sea of information in the site's hundreds of millions of tweets that are sent daily.
"Data is the phenomenon of our time," said IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, as quoted by Reuters.
"Twitter has created something extraordinary. When you bring this together with other kinds of information and leverage IBM's innovations in analytics, Watson and cloud, business decision-making will never be the same," she said at an event to announce the Twitter-IBM partnership.
Rometty personally negotiated with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo to bring about the deal, the Wall Street Journal reported.
IBM will have access to new tweets as they are posted as well as to Twitter's archive of all tweets sent since the site launched in 2006.
See Now: OnePlus 6: How Different Will It Be From OnePlus 5?
