From opening an office in Canada to making a play for TV-adjacent ad dollars, 2013 has already been a big year for Twitter, and it’s about to get bigger. The company began trading Thursday at $26 a share, valuing the company at more than $18 billion. (EDIT TK)
To sustain that value, Twitter needs to sell its suite of ad products – currently its main driver of revenue – and expand as it has with its venture into the TV ad market this year. So as the English web’s favourite microblogging service prepares to go public, Marketing is taking a look at Twitter’s ad offering and how it has been used by Canadian marketers.
This week we’ve covered all of Twitter’s major ad products: promoted tweets, promoted accounts, promoted trends and Twitter Amplify. In our final edition of Understanding Ads on Twitter, we turn our attention to the social network’s targeting capabilities.
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When a consumer signs up for Twitter, the only information they give is an email address. Not their age, gender, location, education or workplace. That’s not to say, however, Twitter is in the dark about who its users are, the type of things they like or the products they’re likely to buy.
Eschewing traditional age and gender based demographics, Twitter instead sells its clients on interest-based targeting. In total, Twitter has 360 interest categories, from food to fitness, that match up to the categories of products its advertisers sell.
Each Twitter user fits into several of these categories, which are becoming increasingly specific as Twitter hones its targeting capabilities.
“Think of it as a tree,” said Ivan Pehar, a senior account executive at Twitter Canada. “You have automotive, but then you have SUVs, luxury SUVs, luxury German SUVs.” Similarly, within “food” there’s fast food, Mexico food, Italian food and the like. It gets that granular.
Pehar admits some clients would prefer traditional demographics, like “males 18-35,” that line up with their traditional media spend, but says data-based targeting often yields better results than the methods favoured by television and print.
“They’ll say they want to target women 25-54, but someone who is 25 probably has different interests than someone who is 52,” he said. “It’s different rules, a different way of thinking about media and consumption.”
Pehar explained Twitter identifies interests based both on who consumers follow and what they tweet about. He uses a fictional consumer, Christina, as an example. Because Christina follows Food Traveler, Marie Claire and Yoga Magazine, Twitter can tell she’s probably interested in food, traveling and yoga. Based on keyword analysis, it can further determine her specific interest.
Brands can also use keywords to target specific consumers with offers or marketing messages. For example, Visa may target any Canadian consumer who tweets about a vacation or getaway with a travel offer. “If Christina tweets, ‘I really need to get out of town. I need a vacation. Anyone have any recommendations for a quick getaway?’ targeting those keywords [vacation and getaway], Visa can serve her a promoted tweet.”
Brands can also target lookalike followers, serving promoted tweets to consumers who have similar interests to the people who already follow them, or target the followers of competitor brands.
“If you’re Toyota, you have the opportunity to target people who follow GM or Ford,” Pehar said. “Auto is a great example. They love to conquest each other in terms of targeting others.”
In Canada, Twitter currently offers geographical targeting by province, but not cities or towns within provinces. If a marketer is looking to target at a more granular level than by province, Pehar said he suggests targeting users who follow local accounts,like the Toronto Star or the Windsor Spitfires hockey team.
Many brands are eager to hone in on specific locations this way, including Telus, where Dan Sorotschynski is director of social and digital.
Sorotschynski said he’d like to be able to target promoted trends by province, as you can with promoted tweets, and also to have city-specific targeting. Because some of Telus’ services are only available in certain areas, or are designed for one market but not another, he said this would increase the success of the brand’s social marketing.
“As we’re trying to get more targeting in our audience profiles it would be nice if we could pinpoint more,” he said. “I know they’re working on it and offer [more] in the U.S. As we start to see things spill over into Canada, that would be a great value add for us.”
