Twitter has tweaked the way it deals with advertising, enabling promoted tweets to be placed in users’ timelines based on recently used keywords.
Users won’t notice a great difference. Ads won’t be shown more frequently in timelines and and users can still dismiss promoted tweets they don’t find relevant, said Nipoon Malhotra, product manager for Twitter, in a blog post.
Keyword targeting should enable advertisers to more effectively target their campaigns.
Twitter advertisers will be able to specify the keywords they wish to initiate a promoted tweet, as well as specifying the geographic location, gender, and client being used, to reach their audience, Malhotra added.
Here’s what it looks like:
The service has already been trialed by a number of firms, including Everything Everywhere, Microsoft Japan, Walgreens, and GoPro.
Previously, Twitter had enabled advertisers to target promoted tweets around a range of broad topics, but today’s changes will enable them to focus in more closely on their intended targets.
According to Malhotra, the early testers reported the use of keyword targeting had shown “users were significantly more likely to engage with promoted tweets using keyword targeting in timeline than other forms of targeting in the timeline.” As an example, GoPro had close to 2 million impressions with engagement rates “as high as 11 percent.”
The move comes as Twitter looks for better ways to make money from its platform. While Twitter has grown rapidly, with tens of millions of users, it relies on advertisers for the bulk of its revenues.
This article was originally published on V3.