Twitter Brings Interest Targeting to Promoted Tweets, Accounts

Twitter’s pitch to advertisers just got a whole lot more interesting. Marketers can now target Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts based on users’ interests.

For example, a dog food brand can run a Promoted Tweet aimed at users who post about their pet or follow other canine-crazy accounts. Twitter’s head of product marketing Guy Yalif said the company has compiled more than 350 interest categories—with 25 broad categories like movies that break down into more specific interests like comedy or horror—through the public signals its more than 140 million monthly active users send out every day, such as who they follow and what they tweet, to create audience segments brands can now target. But marketers can get even more specific than interest category targeting by targeting based on usernames. Username targeting doesn’t mean an ad would be shown to that Twitter account’s followers per se, but Twitter would look at the interests of the account’s followers and promote the tweet or account to users with similar interests.