As the second largest social network with over 500 million users (and still growing), Twitter has become a necessary platform for marketers to reach customers. In 2010, Twitter Ads introduced Promoted Tweets, enabling brands to utilize the search function with keywords to reach targeted users. Last week, Twitter announced that it has enabled several new features for marketers using Promoted Tweets to help really hone in on specific Twitter users.
In the blog post announcing the changes, Twitter explained that:
“Marketers can now select from three different matching options when entering keywords: exact match, phrase match, and basic keyword match. We’ve now launched negative keyword targeting if you want to restrict your Promoted Tweets from showing up when users search for certain keywords. For instance, if you sell bacon, you can now keep your campaigns more than six degrees apart from Kevin Bacon by using “Kevin” as a negative keyword.”
For those already using Promoted Tweets, finding these new features will be easy, as they are simply additional keyword options.
To help advertisers with large campaigns, Twitter also added a new bulk import tool for keywords, which is accessible by clicking on the “import multiple keywords” button in the search targeting tool. Additionally, Twitter rolled out a feature that automatically matches new campaigns to “relevant and related trending topics,” such as trending hashtags. In particular, this new feature should help amplify campaigns that coincidentally contain keywords matching an organically hot topic on Twitter without the need for advertisers to pay extra attention to trends, which can quickly fluctuate.
These new tools from Twitter will undoubtedly be beneficial for advertisers using Twitter to reach new customers – and possibly for customer retention as well. And with these new ways to target Twitter users and leverage trends without having to do much extra work (or really, any work at all) – and with more Twitter users than ever before – it’s clear that if you aren’t yet advertising on Twitter, it’s time to rethink your marketing strategy.
If you haven’t started using Twitter Ads yet, are these new targeting options enough to convince you to give it a try?
Author
Becky is the Senior Content Marketing Manager at TUNE. Before TUNE, she led a variety of marketing and communications projects at San Francisco startups. Becky received her bachelor's degree in English from Wake Forest University. After living nearly a decade in San Francisco and Seattle, she has returned to her home of Charleston, SC, where you can find her enjoying the sun and salt water with her family.
