• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 25, 2011

Twitter confirmed Wednesday buying third-party client TweetDeck for an unconfirmed $40 million in a mix of cash-and-stock deal. But what does the deal offer marketers and advertisers? Twitter spokesperson Jodi Olson said the company plans to invest in the TweetDeck platform by building out services that users know and love. "TweetDeck will continue to be a powerful monitoring tool for brands, publishers and advanced users that want a richer experience that helps them get the most out of Twitter," she said.

TweetDeck will likely become the de facto standard for Twitter clients on all platforms -- replacing Twitter's own client for Android, iOs, Windows, Mac and others, according to David Szetela, founder of Clix Marketing, which became one of the first search marketing services companies to offer Twitter social advertising. "Steve Jobs will try to block Twitter ads appearing in iOS Twitter streams. Google will laugh at him, but win, as usual."

TweetDeck's Deck.ly will allow Twitter to expand tweets to more than 140 characters, Szetela said. While some marketers may want to say bye-bye to microblogging, it had been the intention of Twitter co-founders Biz Stone, Evan Williams, and Jack Dorsey for users to voice it in the least amount of characters possible.

Ben Straley, CEO at social ad startup Meteor, which tracks and shares content through Twitter, Facebook and other social sites, believes the acquisition will help brands better track sentiment. Some Meteor customers use TweetDeck to manage and track buzz across Twitter, but they want a tool to help standardize the process across numerous social channels.

Choosing from the blitz of tools has become the biggest problem. "Many customers have trouble distinguishing themselves from the noise from the dozens of tools available today," he said. "Consolidation in the social data management space makes sense."

eMarketer Principal Analyst Debra Aho Williamson believes Twitter's acquisition of TweetDeck has little to do with analytics, and lots to do with TweetDeck's power users. She said Twitter paid to re-acquire its own power users. It needs them to use Twitter-owned media in order to increase advertiser interest.

However, Aho Williamson said, the social media analytics space has begun to consolidate. For example, Salesforce.com recently acquired Radian6, "more or less the leader in terms of social analytics software."

In terms of Twitter, the social site still needs "to prove itself as a business to advertisers -- and it's already begun acquiring key members of its ecosystem in order to do so, such as TweetDeck, Tweetie, Summize, Cloudhopping and others," Aho Williamson said. "If Twitter thinks it needs to improve its analytics to entice more ad dollars, it will likely look to acquire companies that are already operating in its ecosystem."

David Berkowitz, senior director of emerging media and innovation at 360i, believes the acquisition is mostly about consolidating inventory. "It's in Twitter's best interest to hold court over the user experience as much as it can because that's how they are going to control ad targeting within the platform," he said.

Although Twitter has been somewhat slow to monetize its network, Berkowitz said, there will come a time when they will need to move forward with more opportunities for advertisers. "A critical component of the success of its ad program will be to ensure there is consistent content and experience for the lion's share of its users," he said.