Livefyre acquires Realtidbits to bring an analytics offering to its real-time social software

Real-time social software platform Livefyre has made its second acquisition, this time picking up social application provider Realtidbits in a move that establishes an analytics offering for Livefyre’s customers. As part of the deal, all of Realtidbits’ customers will be migrated over to similar products in the ‘coming weeks’. In addition, Livefyre will be expanding its operation by opening up its fourth office in San Diego.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

If you’re not familiar with Realtidbits, it provides a slew of applications that, to an extent, mirror the offerings of Livefyre. However, what makes it unique is the analytics aspect of things — and it’s own set of customers. While it’s likely that Livefyre’s own suite of products, such as its StreamHub for Enterprise, Social Native Ads, and its commenting platform have some analytics, Realtidbit Analytics could offer it more of a holistic service, something that stretches across all products.

Realtidbits is based in San Diego so the team and technology will remain there. It will become Livefyre’s newest location, joining New York, London, and San Francisco.

Jordan Kretchmer, Livefyre’s founder and CEO highlighted as much in a statement, saying: “They have built a fantastic analytics product, which we plan to integrate into Livefyre StreamHub and offer to our over 550 Enterprise customers … this acquisition brings key product capabilities to our customers…”

As Livefyre competes against the likes of Chute, Echo, Mass Relevance, and others, it certainly needs to come up with new ways to be innovative. And with a growing set of products, finding a way to analyze engagement across everything is needed. Customers could expect to see a package that monitors replies, Likes, social sharing, and other custom metrics. The company says that activity across third-party plugins, Backplane-enabled products, and even third-party Javascript on a webpage can also be monitored.

Perhaps an added bonus Livefyre customers will find is the integration with other analytic services, including Adobe Omniture, Google Analytics, and Mixpanel.

Interestingly, the move hits a bit at Echo, since the real-time conversation platform has at least one app powered by Realtidbits. However, this deal isn’t crippling any company as Echo also offers content and moderation analytics across all its products, and even integrates with Omniture and Google Analytics. So while Livefyre now adds analytics, Echo already had it in place.

Today’s deal comes just two months after Livefyre picked up social media conversation curation platform Storify. It certainly helps in the company’s effort to become a social control center for brands. What’s more, as the real-time social conversation platform provider moves forward with its Native Ad platform, advertisers require some means of tracking performance and Realtidbits’ acquisition could help here.

Photo credit: FRANK RUMPENHORST/AFP/Getty Images