Twitter has launched interest-based ad targeting for Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts campaigns letting brands target micro-bloggers based on like-minded groups of followers and their friends.
Promoted Tweets and Accounts already target “users who share interests with your current followers.”
The new service now lets advertisers explicitly identify the interests that they want to reach.
Twitter looks at several signals, including geographic location and keywords in tweets to understand interests. Twitter considers interests to determine the type of content to serve up in “Discover” or recommends in the “Who to Follow” feature.
Advertisers can create custom segments by specifying certain @usernames relevant to the product, the event or the initiative.
Custom audience segments enable advertisers to reach Twitter users with similar interests to that @username’s followers.
The ad-targeting tool does not allow the brand to target the followers of that @username.
The company has been testing interest-based targeting with several advertisers, including mens fashion etailer Bonobos, Walgreens and Electronic Arts.
Supported by more than 350 categories, such as education, home and garden, investing, and soccer, the tool allows brands to widen or narrow the reach of targeted ads.
Bonobos held a 24-hour sale exclusively on Twitter, and got word out by promoting Tweets to followers, along with Twitter users similar to the brand’s followers. This targeting resulted in an average engagement rate for Promoted Tweets campaigns between 1% and 3%.
Twitter has also lowered the minimum bid to one cent for all of auctions. The minimum bid in those auctions has been reduced from 50 cents to 1 cent. Lowering the cost could make these programs more accessible to small businesses and allow existing advertisers to run more campaigns.
Read the official Twitter blog post here
