Twitter Is Joining The Targeted Ad “Bandwagon”

Do you find it odd to be on Facebook and start seeing ads of a business or interest that you haven’t “liked” but would be interested in? Advertisers everyday are scouring Facebook profiles and paying for ads to target and advertise to people that maybe interested in their business or product. It’s not new and is only going to get more sophisticated and advanced.

Well if you are a Twitter user as a well, you may start seeing something similar. In a bid to enhance their advertising program and a way to generate revenue, Twitter recently announced via their blog, that they would soon be experimenting with ways of making ads more “useful” by matching ads more closely to users on Twitter using retargeting technology.

This type of retargeting is a little different from Facebook’s ads as it will though be based on a browser cookie ID that gets matched to Twitter accounts and/or on contacts from, say, a businesses’ mailing list getting matched up with Twitter account names. By adding this feature, Twitter will hopefully show its users more targeted ads to their interests.

So for example, the new ad format sounds like it will work like this. Using the example of an online eyeglasses company with a Labor Day special, the company may have a list of people who subscribe to its newsletter or visit its website. The company can then choose to target their Promoted Tweet ads to those users.

With its mailing list, Twitter would match up names the business shares with a scrambled, unreadable email address (a hash) or browser-related information (a browser cookie ID). Twitter will then match that information to accounts in order to show them a promoted Tweet with the Labor Day deal. Twitter says it wouldn’t give advertisers any additional user information, nor would ads be served to third party sites.

It seems like IT has met social media marketing and it should be interesting how effective it becomes.

For more information on how to best advertise and market your business using  social media, contact The Interactive Imprint today or call 954-254-1650.