Twitter Introduces Keyword Targetting To Timeline

Yesterday, Twitter released keyword targeting in timelines: a ‘new feature [which] enables advertisers to reach users based on the keywords in their recent Tweets and the Tweets with which users recently engaged’, says Twitter in the announcement post on the Twitter advertising blog.

Keyword targeting could prove to be a powerful tool, as it will allow advertisers to target users as soon as they post relevant content on Twitter. It will also mean that users are more likely to see advertising relevant to their tweets. Keyword targeting is an option for advertisers creating promoted tweets: advertisers must ad specific keywords that they want twitter to search for; users who tweet those keywords will be shown promoted tweets as soon as they have used them. In the announcement post, Product Manager Nipoon Malhotra describes how the instantaneousness and the relevance of promoted tweets make them far more effective:

This is an important new capability – especially for those advertisers looking for signals of intent – because it lets marketers reach users at the right moment, in the right context.

For example, say a telecommunications network provider is building a cell tower to provide signal to somewhere new, they could target users in that area who are complaining about the signal they have using their current provider. Another example: a magazine publisher whose new edition contains a big interview with a celebrity could target people who name the celebrity in their tweets.

The new feature has already had some success during the testing phase, with companies such as GoPro (@GoPro), Everything Everywhere (@EE), Microsoft Japan (@SurfaceJP) and Walgreens (@Walgreens) all noticing significantly higher engagement with their promoted tweets when they used keyword targeting.

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.

The keyword search feature for the timeline is very similar to that for search: enter the keywords, decide whether you want Twitter to look for the phrase or just each individual word and select the other targeting options – gender, geotargeting, device, etcetera.

Apart from maybe seeing more relevant advertising, users won’t notice any change to the promoted tweets feature: there won’t be any more and they can still dismiss the ones they don’t want to see. Keyword targeting is available to all markets and languages supported by the full Twitter Ads UI and the Ads API.

Have you used the keyword targeting feature yet? What’s it like?

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Will Sigsworth

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