Twitter has seemingly struggled to find a way to monetise itself. Promoted Tweets, and deals with Google over real-time search haven’t really hit home for the micro-blogging songbird.

Could we now be seeing the start of a more solid business model?

Following rumours of Twitter in talks with Facebook and Google earlier in 2011, it seems it is Twitter now doing the acquiring.

Manage It

Twitter acquired TweetDeck in May 2011, Twitter has itself a solid power-user application.

Managing Twitter at a corporate level can be a challenge. Applications such as HootSuite and Co-Tweet currently dominate this space, at a price. TweetDeck has some way to go before it offers the functionality found in these other offerings; although I can’t see it being long before it gets there.

Measure It

Once you have an application to manage your your Twitter account, you now just need to measure the results of your activity.

Today Twitter announced its acquisition of BackType, a marketing intelligence platform along the lines of Radian 6 or Raven Tools.

You can just see what is coming! Currently allowing 3rd parties access to it’s data, the richer dataset is surely going to come from Twitter itself via BackType?

Twitter is on a roll, this is probably not the last of it’s acquisitions; Adgrok, a keyword bidding application, is worth keeping an eye on as a future acquisition.

With the right tools in place, measuring ROI on Twitter will become easier than ever.