Twitter Buys British Again!

Twitter to take social media advertising on TV

In the near future, there may be more social media discussion relating to television in the UK, as Twitter has made a move to become a major player in the advertising industry. By doing this they have also made millionaires of two British brothers from Bristol.

Andy and Ted Littledale will relocate their company from its current base in Bristol, to Twitter’s London sales headquarters. Their previous offices, Aardman Animations were the studios behind Wallace and Gromit, and were in a relatively quiet environment, so the change in scenery will certainly be a shock. SecondSync will also give up its space at Google’s Campus building in east London as part of the deal.

The brothers aged 39 and 32, began their careers as developers at the BBC and each held a number of technical roles within media before splitting off and co-founding SecondSync in 2011 with Dan Fairs and Lee Carre. All four of them owned around a quarter of the business before they sold a minority stake last year to Kantar, part of Sir Martin Sorrell’s advertising conglomerate WPP. The company built a number of tools that enable advertisers to measure their impact on social media, and this includes number of tweets generated by advertisements, keeping track of budgeting.

SecondSync has become a massive name in the world of advertising, and most broadcasters use them when generating statistics about their impact on the world of advertising. Ian Maude, a digital media and advertising specialist went on to say “Twitter is the natural home for SecondSync and Twitter is pushing hard to integrate itself into the television industry.”

The SecondSync deal is Twitter’s second British acquisition following its £25 million purchase of Tweetdeck in 2011, and the most recent deal is considered to be around half of what Twitter paid back then. It is possible a reactive move from Twitter in the wake of Facebook’s recent business deals. Facebook is of course its main rival in the race to capitalise on television online, so this could prove to be a very wise purchase by the social media giants.

Funnily enough, it was just a month ago that Facebook and SecondSync announced a new partnership to offer analysis of TV related discussion. At the time Andrew Littledale said that his company were “looking forward to working with Facebook to bring this data to the market.”

Speculation naturally arose that competition from Facebook sparked a bid from Twitter, but in a blog post, SecondSync were dismissive of its owner’s rival: “Twitter is the only place that hosts real-time, public conversation about TV at scale.” They went on to say that “By joining Twitter, we will be able to help take that experience, in concert with the rest of the TV ecosystem, to the next level.”

Now that Twitter has acquired the company, they will use SecondSync’s technology to drive Twitter’s television effort outside the USA. It already works with ratings firm Nielsen to encourage advertisers and broadcasters to track tweets. Alongside the British acquisition was another one in the form of Mesagraph, who are a French company offering the same sort of technology. This could see Twitter become more prominent in the eyes of British social media and television in the future, and could have a detrimental impact to Facebook’s plans to seemingly buy every company in the world.

Alex Smith

Alex is an English Literature and Sociology undergraduate whose love for written word has led him to write about some obscure topics in his time. Currently a content writer at Social Media Frontiers, be sure to follow him @AlexSatSMF.

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