Up until the latest innovation, advertising on Twitter meant buying a promoted tweet. | REUTERS Twitter's new targeting method

Twitter is finally joining its competitors in making money off of what it knows about its users.

The booming microblog quietly rolled out to advertisers earlier this month a new targeting method, one that helps campaigns and companies reach people based on what users they follow and what they retweet.


“What you can do now is reach people who have certain interests but who may not necessarily follow you,” said Peter Greenberger, director of sales in Twitter’s Washington office. “You couldn’t do that two weeks ago.”

Up until the latest innovation, advertising on Twitter has meant buying a promoted tweet that appears when certain words or phrases are searched or getting a tweet atop the feeds of current followers.

Now, however, Twitter is deducing what specific users are interested in based on what they talk about and with whom they interact — a model pioneered by Facebook and Google. The tweets can be geo-targeted, too, which makes it useful for candidates hoping to reach people only in swing states or in their particular districts.

“I have used it with some of my clients and I’ve been very impressed,” said Vincent Harris, a Republican campaign strategist working this cycle for Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), as well as Senate candidates Ted Cruz of Texas and Linda McMahon of Connecticut. “This will be beneficial because it will allow campaigns to run ads to specific geographical areas without needing to tweet broadly to the entire follower base.”

In essence, Twitter is constructing interest profiles for each user based on information the user volunteers. Some Twitter users and privacy advocates are uncomfortable with that idea, particularly when it involves commodifying political views.

“Our decisions about who we vote for and positions we take are personal ones, and Twitter users shouldn’t be sold to the highest special-interest bidder as if they were being pitched fast food or movies,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. “Twitter has tried to position itself as a privacy-sensitive company. It should adopt an opt-in policy for political ads and help set a higher standard for how politics uses the power of the online medium.”

Privacy advocates have been after federal regulators and lawmakers to require Internet companies to get users’ consent before targeting ads of this sort through an opt-in process. They cite a survey by the University of Pennsylvania earlier this year that found that 86 percent of voters did not want political campaigns to target ads based on their interests.

Greenberger, like Facebook and Google spokespersons before him, defended the practice as a way of delivering relevant advertising on topics of interest to users. There is no opt-out mechanism on Twitter.

Twitter users are also sensitive to Twitter giving easy, blanket access to their follower lists, which is why Greenberger insisted Twitter is not permitting advertisers to reach every follower of a certain person. Instead, these interest-targeted tweets go to people who, as he put it, “look like the followers” of other people who would logically have certain interests. The distinction, which seems small and confusing, is important, he claimed.

“Let’s say I have a super PAC called ‘Pet Lovers for Obama,’ I’m going to target all my promoted tweets to people who are interested in pets,” Greenberger said. “In addition to that, I know a lot of pet lovers follow @ilovepets. I’m going to put that in, maybe two or three others that are likely to draw pet people. Then what we’re going to do on our end is serve that tweet just to people interested in pets.”

There are clear differences between the Facebook and Twitter models, namely that Facebook users usually provide their real names, locations and a laundry list of personal interests. Twitter users can be anonymous, can have multiple accounts and can have a variety of reasons for why they follow or say what they do.

Still, Greenberger said Twitter can deduce an awful lot about a person based “mostly by looking at who you follow, that’s the most telling sign. But we’re also looking at what’s in your profile, what do you retweet, what do you tweet about.”

Twitter can even, he said, target based on the device.

“Maybe Android users are with us and iPhone users are against us,” he said. “You can do it that way, too.”

While Twitter couldn’t point to any of the national campaigns using this method yet, Greenberger was in Tampa, Fla., and Charlotte, N.C., in recent weeks explaining it to campaign managers from both sides of the aisle at the party conventions.

With the massive amount of money in this year’s races, it’s clear that both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama will give this a go sooner or later.

“We work very closely with the Twitter team and have been utilizing all of the targeting capabilities they offer us as they become available,” said Zac Moffatt, Romney’s digital campaign director.

Of course, the potential here goes far beyond politics. Greenberger also noted that there may come a day when a user who tweets that he’s hungry could instantly receive tweets from a nearby pizzeria offering a deal.

This article tagged under: Twitter

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