DataSift Unlocks Data Access to World's Second Largest Economy With Sina Weibo

SAN FRANCISCO, CA and LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM--(Marketwired - Dec 19, 2013) - DataSift, the platform that powers the social economy, announced today the addition of Sina Weibo (NASDAQ: SINA) as a new data source, further enhancing the ability of brands, agencies and social tech companies to curate and extract value from social data. The DataSift platform unlocks the rich data content of Sina Weibo and turns it into a curated data feed that can be used to build custom applications or delivered directly into an enterprise. This allows organizations to analyze audiences, monitor brands and sentiment and gives a real time window into consumer behavior. The DataSift platform fully supports the needs of Chinese languages, enabling users to accurately understand and tag keywords and phrases.

Sina Weibo is the dominant social network in the vibrant Chinese economy with more than 500M registered users and upwards of 100M messages posted per day. Considered to be the best of both Facebook and Twitter for Chinese users, Sina Weibo is growing rapidly, having recently expanded beyond China to Singapore and Indonesia. Access to Sina Weibo data will provide companies with the opportunity to better understand localized consumer preferences, demographics and interests in a market with more than 1.6B consumers.

"China is a high growth and strategic market for many companies, and the ability to better understand Chinese market dynamics, audiences and segments is a strategic priority for many of our customers," said Rob Bailey, CEO of DataSift. "With our leading social data platform, customers can now leverage Sina Weibo data to enable better strategy development, build custom analytics and drive improved operational execution based on real time market data."

The Sina Weibo data source will be available via Socialgist in the DataSift platform in limited release as of today and subscription customers will be able to take full advantage of platform features to better curate the data, including:

• Access and filter real time Sina Weibo data
• Analyze sentiment in Chinese language conversations
• Chinese word tokenization and text mining for precise identification of key phases and terms to specifically identify brands and products
• Contextualize posts with structured metadata based on customizable rules for categorization and scoring
• Utilize link augmentation and additional enrichments

"Sina Weibo has proven to be a natural place for Chinese consumers to discuss the companies and brands that are important to them," stated Darren Kelly, President of Socialgist. "Weibo is now a required source for anyone who studies social media in today's global economy. The introduction of Sina Weibo to DataSift's leading social data platform creates new opportunities for global brands looking to invest in better understanding consumers around the world." 

For more information about Sina Weibo on DataSift, please visit datasift.com/platform/datasources/sina-weibo/

About DataSift
DataSift Inc. is the platform the powers the social economy, enabling companies to aggregate, filter and extract insights from the billions of public social conversations on Twitter, leading social networks and millions of other sources. DataSift provides access to both real-time and historical social data to uncover insights and trends that relate to brands, businesses, financial markets, news and public opinion. Key investors include Insight Venture Partners, Scale Venture Partners, Upfront Ventures and IA Ventures. DataSift has offices in San Francisco, New York City and Reading, U.K. For more information, visit www.datasift.com and follow us on Twitter @datasift.

About Socialgist
Socialgist is the first official provider of Sina Weibo outside of PRC. Socialgist supports the largest users of social media data in the world, including enterprise-class social media listening, business intelligence, big data and predictive analytic applications for CRM, marketing, finance and research. Socialgist provides two core services, sourcing of specific social media data sources and data management. Socialgist's mission is to provide access to the world's social media. For more information, email contact@socialgist.com or visit www.socialgist.com.