Refining your advertising based on demographics is great, but now Twitter lets you fine tune your ad recipients by keywords.
In a welcome move, Twitter offers advertisers the ability to target users based on key words used in their previous tweets. This holds the promise of getting news of your accounting firm and its services directly to the people who have expressed an interest in them through their own tweets. The result should be more followers, more clients and a much easier time finding like-minded audiences with which to discuss industry developments.
You've long had the option to target your ads based on geography or user demographics, and even using the interest graph based on users' behavior on the social media site. Traditionally, these have been fairly useful refinements. But selecting people to view your ads from a group who are actually tweeting using keywords you choose should result in far more accurate delivery that matches real interest in the topic to the ads viewers receive.
In addition to using the words in their own tweets, users can also be selected if they have engaged with tweets containing the terms you choose. For example, if a Twitter user has made comments or retweets about an article about #taxcredits or #retirementsavingsstrategies, you'll be able to make sure that user sees an ad for your firm.
Nipoon Malhotra of Twitter explains in a blog post how to use the new feature: "Setting up a campaign to target keywords in the timeline is very similar to the setup process for search. Enter the keywords you want to target, choose whether you want to use phrase match or unordered keyword match, and specify your other targeting options such as geographic location, device and gender."
The strategy seems like a logical win both for users and advertisers. Tests by the social media site indicate that it is indeed an effective way to deliver Promoted Tweets to where they're welcome news. Malhotra says,
"In our tests with a small group of advertisers and agencies like Everything Everywhere (@EE), Microsoft Japan (@SurfaceJP), and Walgreens (@Walgreens), users were significantly more likely to engage with Promoted Tweets using keyword targeting in timeline than other forms of targeting in the timeline.
GoPro (@GoPro), a leader in wearable and gear-mountable cameras, is a great example of a test partner that achieved promising results. After testing keyword targeting in timeline across four marketing campaigns, GoPro saw close to two million impressions, and engagement rates as high as 11 percent on Tweets promoted using the new feature."
Anything that lets advertisers deliver their messages to receptive audiences is a good thing for the recipients who may appreciate them (as opposed to being annoyed by irrelevant ads) and the accounting firms who pay for the ads. This new approach to advertising from Twitter appears to offer a win-win situation that will increase the value of your advertising dollar on the site.
What do you think? Will you try keyword targeting on Twitter and if so, what words will you use? Give it a shot and when you do, please let us know how well it worked for your firm.