Twitter is taking its tv ad targeting software, which it premiered in beta mode in May, and is expanding it to to all U.S. advertisers that run national television spots, it was announced Tuesday.
"The results of the beta test reveal that the impact of using Twitter in combination with TV advertising is significantly greater than that of using TV advertising alone," Michael Fleischman, product manager or revenue, wrote in a blog post.
"So today, we’re pleased to announce the general availability of TV ad targeting in the U.S. to advertisers running national television commercials."
The technology allows advertisers to engage directly with people on Twitter who have been exposed to their ads on live television.
It works by identifying Tweets that correspond with that television show. Because the person was engaged enough to tweet about it, the company figures that they watched the ads as well (which, in all honesty, is a bit of a leap. It is more likely they were sending the tweets in question while the ads were playing). Twitter will then push out promoted tweets that extend those advertisements.
Say, for example, you are watching the newest episode of the Big Bang Theory. If you tweet about what happened in that show, and then a commercial comes on for Holiday Inn, that company can then send you a promoted message.
It may seem like kind of a silly idea, but it seems to be working so far.
During the beta period,Twitter says that users that Twitter identified as being exposed on TV and then engaged with a Promoted Tweet demonstrated a 95% stronger message association and 58% higher purchase intent compared to users identified as being exposed on TV alone.
Advertisers using TV ad targeting also reported engagement rates that were 27 percent higher than their historical averages.
Twitter also noted that it is going to be giving advertisers a new set of analytics so that "advertisers using TV ad targeting will be able to better understand what users on Twitter are saying about their ad campaigns. Advertisers will have direct and easy access to user feedback on TV creatives — feedback they can use to optimize their Promoted Tweet campaigns."
Television is not the only ad targeting that Twitter has been experimenting with lately.
In April, Twitteri ntroduced a new keyword targeting tool, which will allow advertisers to sell ads to users based on words in their tweets.
For example, if a user tweets that they like a certain band, and wants to go see them at a specific venue. That venue could then run a geo-targeted campaign using keywords for that band with a Tweet containing a link to buy the tickets.
Earlier this month, Twitter also revealed that it was starting to test out targeted cookie-based ads.
Here is the example that Twitter uses: a local florist has the idea to advertise on Twitter for a special he is running on Valentines Day. But he only wants to have the ad go to people who will, you know, actually buy flowers, such as "flower enthusiasts," or peope who regularly visit their website or subscribe to their newsletter. Those people will, most likely, be the ones who actually respond to those ads.
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Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests.
Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.
Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes.
We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.
There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.
In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet.
At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.
Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.
What's next for Twitter?
We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users.
We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.
