Recently, Twitter rolled out a new effort to build up their advertising business. Now you can purchase ads that will reach users based on the keywords in their recent tweets as well as the tweets they’ve interacted with recently. Today we’re going to go into some detail about this new feature and talk about how useful it might be to you. 

In other words, we’re going to tell you why you care.

We might also talk about ice cream because it’s May now and summer is coming!

What is keyword targeting?

Keyword targeting is a way for brands to show ads to users based on specific words in their tweets as well as words in tweets they’ve interacted with recently. In this way, people can be targeted based on things they’ve already said they’re interested in. As Twitter explains it, marketers can “reach users at the right moment in the right context” instead of trying to reach them on the basis of geographic location or demographic information.  

This does not mean you’ll see more ads on Twitter

Twitter promises us that this won’t mean that every time we tweet something we’ll see an ad for something related to it.  It just means that we’ll see more stuff related to things we actually care about. We’ll still be able to ignore Promoted Tweets, but we might not be as likely to ignore things since the ones we see will be more relevant to us. And indeed that is the hope behind these changes. Twitter hopes that this new feature will make people a lot more likely to engage with Promoted Tweets.

And this is why you care: people who are already interested in what you’re saying will see your tweets.

Pretty freakin’ sweet, right?

Speaking of sweet…

How it works

Twitter uses the example of advertising concert tickets to explain how this all works, but we’re going to talk about it in language that more of us can understand and appreciate: ice cream.

So let’s pretend that a user tweets about totally digging red velvet cake, and it so happens that YOU just added that flavor to your ice cream menu. You can run a geotargeted ad campaign using the keywords “red velvet cake” with a tweet that links to your ice cream shop’s website. That tweeter, having expressed an interest in red velvet cake, will now become aware of the glory and the wonder that is your newest flavor— red velvet cake ice cream. And it’s all because of this keyword targeting business.

How to do it

Setting up a targeted keyword campaign is easy peasy. First, you do your research and come up with the keywords you’d like to use (in our example that might be “red velvet cake,” “red velvet cake ice cream,” etc.). Choose whether you want to use phrase match or unordered keyword match. Next, you pick from other targeting options like geographic location, gender, and type of device. Your promoted tweets will then appear in user’s timelines when they mention any of your keywords or interact with other people’s posts that contain them.

It’ll be interesting to see how this takes off, but we think it sounds like it’s going to work really well. Folks who have already tried it are giving good reports, but we’d like to hear from any of you who’ve given it a whirl.

How did it work for you and would you do it again?