Twitter launches targeting tool for advertisers

As part of Twitter's efforts to sell more ads, and turn its audience into income, the microblogging social platform has launched a new tool that can target its 140 million users with Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts, based on interests.

Until now, advertisers were only able to target ads to users that they Followed, limiting potential reach.

According to Twitter's blog announcement, "There are two flavors of interest targeting. For broader reach, you can target more than 350 interest categories, ranging from Education to Home and Garden to Investing to Soccer, as shown in the screenshot below. As an example, if you were promoting a new animated film about dogs, you could select Animation (under Movies and Television), Cartoons (under Hobbies and Interests), and Dogs (under Pets)."

Along with the roll-out of interest targeting, Twitter also dropped the minimum bid to just one cent.

"We believe the new lower minimum bid, in combination with interest targeting, will drive greater ROI for every campaign on Twitter," said Twitter's Kevin Weil on the company's blog.

Tags: ad targeting, advertising, microblogging, online advertising, social marketing, social media, Twitter