Twitter is relied on by millions of people to discover and engage in live events of all kinds. Events such as the super bowl, presidential debates, national holidays, and charity events are all being talked about on Twitter. Thursday, July 23rd Twitter released a new feature that allows advertisers to reach audiences interested in these events with the event targeting feature.
With event targeting, you can be zoned in on live events and happenings. It will allow advertisers to learn more about the participating audiences through valuable insights and quickly create a campaign and deliver the right message to the users that are following and engaging in an event as it unfolds.
The event targeting feature boils down to three main tools, event calendar, event insights, and event activation.
Event Calendar
The event calendar basically just highlights events from all over the world. Events related to sports, holidays, festivals, television, music and politics are all highlighted on the calendar. These are mostly all highlighted in five major countries, U.S., UK, France, Brazil and Japan. You can then select which live events are best tailored for your business marketing strategy. The calendar allows you to search by location, date, type of event and explore months ahead for these events.
Event Insights
After selecting which events you feel are good events to target, event insights help you drill down on each event. You can learn more about the audience based on previous year’s data. Some of the insight information you are given consists of a total audience reach, device breakdown and gender. You can also view the highest engaging Tweets from previous years to help get a sense of how the event played out on Twitter.
Event Activation
After deciding what events you are interested in marketing to and do all of your research on that specific event you can start a campaign in just one click. Event targeting can break down who exactly you’d like to target for an event. Key targeting types consist of gender, language and device.
The event targeting feature is available to all Twitter advertisers globally. To access the feature, log into ads.twitter.com, and select event calendar from the tools menu.
Although targeting insights mainly focus on historical data, promoted tweets ads will be pushed only to people who are engaged with the current event going on, said Ameet Ranadive, Twitter’s senior director of revenue products. Ranadive said this means marketers will be able to reach people they were likely missing during previous campaigns. Those efforts used to depend on manual research compiling lists of relevant terms and hashtags.
Marketers will now be able to tweak their content based on previous results and then let Twitter do the rest with the Twitter algorithm. This feature might be great for advertisers but what about for the Twitter users?
Ranadive said event targeting uses Twitter’s standard ad targeting rules that limit the number of ads served to a user during a certain period of time. “Those rules guard against inundating people with too many ads,” Ranadive said.
The feature has been tested out and has seen improvements in engagement rates. Mindshare UK targeted Wimbledon and the British Open and saw engagement rates increase from 73% to 110% when compared to previous year’s traditional targeting settings.
Twitter has been dabbling with advertising for a little while now and this seems to be the best yet. Since Twitter users are so heavily engaged with events this could be the perfect marketing tool for advertisers everywhere.
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