Twitter To Allow Interest Based Marketing
Posted on September 12, 2012
Twitter is one of those social media outlets that confuse many. Limited to just 140 characters per "tweet," making an impactful marketing post about your business or product can be a difficult task. And the general vision of Twitter users can be just as difficult to wrap your head around. In 2009, a two week study classified nearly half of all tweets as "Pointless Babble." Given some of its mystery and constraints, many businesses have steered clear, but Twitter is set to make marketing to their 500+ million active users a bit more effective. Last week, Twitter announced that it would allow advertisers to directly target users based on the interests that they reveal in their tweets. In addition, the company announced that the minimum price of "promoted tweets," essentially paid advertisements out to users, has been slashed from $.50 each to just a penny. Advertisers will now be able to sort through roughly 350 topics to form a "very narrow, very specific and incredibly focused audience" according to Kevin Weil, Twitter Director of Product Management. So a user that continually tweets about basketball may get sports apparel promotions. A user that raves about local cuisine might see ads from nearby restaurants. Twitter will be analyzing "a host of signals" to provide the most effective targeting, including which accounts a user follows, tweet topics, replies, and more. According to Twitter, between 1% and 3% of "promoted tweets" lead to a click, but initial testings have seen higher results with the new interest-targeting focus. Much like Facebook, the marketing effectiveness of Twitter has long been a question. Earlier this year, reports hit that many companies were stopping Facebook advertising altogether following low response rates. Navigating the waters of advertising on these social media sites is a two-edged sword. On one side, users are actively publishing what they are interested in, making for a highly attractive audience to pursue. On the other, a strong portion of these users on these social media sites are not looking to be marketed to, making for low response rates and conversions. As one of the 10 most visited websites in the world, Twitter is a medium that should at least be evaluated in your marketing plans. Maybe advertising and posting on the site would be a fantastic low cost marketing option for your business. Maybe not. If you want assistance with that evaluation, give us a call. We are happy to help.
