Skip to main content

Twitter advertisers can now show ads when users tweet specific keywords

Twitter advertisers can now show ads when users tweet specific keywords

Share this story

Promoted Tweet stock
Promoted Tweet stock

Twitter continues to give advertisers more tools to more effectively target their marketing dollars. Today the company revealed that it is now giving advertisers the ability to target ads using keywords in users' tweets. It's no more complicated than it sounds: companies can now set parameters that will show promoted tweets to users who include certain words in their posts. According to AllThingsD, the new tool also monitors what you retweet and favorite to determine if it should show you a promoted tweet. It's an incredibly intuitive addition, and, unsurprisingly, keywords have previously been used to help target Twitter advertising dollars. The difference now is that companies can specifically use keywords when designing advertising campaigns — previously, key terms were simply one of many criteria a user's "interest graph" depended on. The addition comes after Twitter rolled out a feature last year allowing advertisers to focus on one of 350 interest categories that the social network placed its users into.

There are some advanced features included in the keyword targeting tool to help advertisers hone in on the right audience. In addition to keywords, criteria like location, device, and gender can be used to limit who will see the ads. Twitter's Kevin Weil also tells AllThingsD that companies can use "negative sentiment filtering" to make sure that people who are tweeting negative comments about companies won't be shown ads about that firm, for instance. The idea behind keyword targeting is that it will allow companies to have a better idea of "intent," as it's known in the industry. Instead of spending advertising dollars scattershot, the theory is that these features will allow them to focus on those who are particularly interested in a purchase.