• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, April 15, 2014

As part of a broader effort to surface more relevant content and insights for users, advertisers and data addicts, Twitter has agreed to buy social data provider Gnip.
 
“Together, we plan to offer more sophisticated data sets,” Jana Messerschmidt, vice president of global business development & platform at Twitter, said in a Tuesday blog post.

Among other industries, Twitter has become a reliable consumer research tool for agencies and brands. Just this month, the microblogging giant entered into a five-year research partnership with WPP’s Kantar.

Twitter has used Gnip’s API aggregation technology for about four years. Since teaming up, the company has delivered roughly 2.3 trillion tweets to customers around the world, Gnip CEO Chris Moody noted in his own blog post on Tuesday. Since late 2012, Gnip has helped brands, PR agencies and other data specialists access tweets going back to Twitter’s birth in 2006.

What has set Gnip apart from rivals like DataSift has been its ability to demystify data, according company executives. Indeed, connecting with clients is all about “humanizing” data, Jack Harvey, executive vice president of partnerships at Gnip, told attendees of MediaPost’s Social Media Insider Summit, earlier this year.

Gnip clients include Waggener Edstrom, PayPal and mapping software company Esri. Beyond their respective blog posts, Twitter and Gnip declined to elaborate on the deal on Tuesday. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.