Twitter eyeing Japan for revenue from data for businesses

Twitter has its eyes on Japan, with its 3.5 million users, to make money from companies eager to use Twitter data to research retail trends, manage inventory and improve customer service.
Although tweets are public, the San Francisco-based social media company offers special technological tools to better analyze and take into account for all tweets, including those in archives, through partner companies such as NTT Data and NetBase, which pay Twitter.
Randy Almond, Twitter's head of marketing, told reporters Thursday the partners in turn get paid by companies hoping to improve their businesses using information from Twitter data. Twitter rarely gets paid directly by the brands.

Twitter says it deals properly with people's privacy concerns, and the way data is used should never surprise Twitter users.