How Do I Target Audiences On Twitter? — Part 2

Published in

Inside Revenue

11 min readJun 5, 2018

The Intermediate Guide

In my last article, I went over the basics of Twitter targeting, and why you should care about it. If you missed this article read it here, “How Do I Target Audiences On Twitter? — Part 1 (The Beginner’s Guide)”.

Twitter is a vastly untapped market, as many advertisers still prefer to market on more traditional sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook. It is for this reason that using Twitter in your marketing efforts still a relatively cheap way to advertise. By making use of audience targeting on Twitter, you can greatly increase your chances of generating company revenue.

In this article, I want to go into more detail on targeting on Twitter, and show you some ways that you can refine your Twitter targeting to get the best results.

“Think like a publisher not like a marketer.” — David Meerman Scott (Marketing And Sales Strategist) @dmscott

How Can Targeting An Audience On Twitter Help Me Hit My Company’s Revenue Targets?

In this article I will cover:

#1 Twitter Targeting Options

#2 3 Simple Ways To Target On Twitter

Lets get stuck in…

___________________________________________________________________

#1 Twitter Targeting Options

As discussed in my previous post, there are 7 targeting options available to you on Twitter. In this section I want to go into detail on how you can target your audiences with these methods

Interest Targeting

Twitter interest targeting enables you to tap into the many thriving communities on Twitter by delivering targeted communications to users based on the topics they connect and engage with on Twitter.

Interest targeting ensures that you’re serving up your campaign to users whose interests broadly align with your business. Coupled with compelling content, it can help you reach a receptive audience that is ready and excited to engage on the topics most pertinent to your products or services.

How Interest Targeting Works:
Interest targeting connects you to a large group of users by prompting you to choose from 25 interest categories that expand into 350 sub-topics, ranging from “Education” to “Sports”. For example, if you are a web design company promoting an offer, you could choose to target “Technology” under the Business category, and “Web Design” under Technology.

Follower Targeting

Follower targeting helps you connect with the people who are likely to be interested in your business. It works by displaying your Twitter Ads campaigns to people who are similar to the followers of the usernames you select. Follower targeting is located under additional targeting, under “Add followers”.

How To Use Follower Targeting:

When choosing which usernames to target, you can create custom audience segments by specifying certain usernames that are relevant to your business.

Consider focusing on one of these followers targeting categories:

Competitors: Target the usernames of businesses who offer similar products and services.
Complimentary Brands: Include the usernames of businesses who aren’t direct competitors, but who target a similar audience. For example, a fitness app might want to target the followers of athletic clothing brands, running shoe companies, and gyms.
Industry Bedia: Try targeting the usernames of news sites, blogs, TV shows, magazines, etc. that focus on your industry or target demographic.
Influencers: Focus on the usernames of individuals who are influential in your industry. For example, a retail company could target the followers of popular fashion bloggers.
Similar Audiences: You can also target users who are similar to the people who already follow you.

Device Targeting

With over 80% of users accessing Twitter from their mobile device, it’s important to ensure your Twitter Ads are relevant and optimized for a mobile audience. To control the types of devices that people are viewing your ads on, you can use device targeting.

Types Of Device Targeting:

Operating system versions
Specific devices
Wifi connectivity
Mobile carriers
New devices

Behaviour Targeting

Behavior targeting enables you to reach audiences on Twitter based on their shopping behavior, lifestyle, and other key attributes. With this type of targeting, you can reach users who have shown powerful signals of intent outside of Twitter — helping you achieve the highest possible return on investment from your advertising campaigns.

With behavior targeting, you can reach audiences based on how they behave online and offline, based on information provided by Twitter partners. For example, with this information, a pet food company can connect with dog owners that purchase a specific brand of dog food. A nonprofit can reach an audience that donates to a specific cause. And luxury brands can limit campaigns to shoppers who earn a household income above a certain threshold.

Advertisers running campaigns in the U.S. can “Add behaviors” when selecting targeting criteria.

Expand the “Add behaviors” option to search, browse, and select the behaviors that best describe your target audience. You can select from a variety of behavior categories including specific brand purchases, lifestyle, and household characteristics.

Behavior targeting is currently available to advertisers running campaigns in the U.S. and the U.K

Tailored Audiences

Tailored Audiences are a great way to create highly relevant remarketing campaigns. For example, with Tailored Audiences, a mobile app can remarket to users who have not engaged with their app recently. A software company can reach individuals that attended a recent conference. And fashion brand @iCLOTHING targets shoppers that recently visited their website.

See how brands like Greenhouse Software used Tailored Audience targeting to increase newsletter subscribers on the platform here.

Three Ways To Use Tailored Audiences:

Lists
Use lists to target specific users, whether you want to reach your existing customers by uploading a list of their email addresses or use Twitter usernames (@handles) to target relevant influencers.
Web
Target the people that have recently visited your website. You can collect this data using Twitter’s website tag (available through Twitter Ads), or you can use Twitter’s Official Partner Program.
Mobile apps
Reach groups of people who have taken a specific action in your app, such as install or sign up. You can collect data on who uses your mobile app with conversion tracking.

How Do Tailored Audiences Work?

When you log into Twitter Ads, click on the Tools drop down in the top navigation, select Audience manager and then click on Create new list audience. Give your Twitter Tailored Audience a descriptive name and select the type of data file you are uploading (such as email addresses, Twitter usernames or mobile advertising IDs).

Once you’ve uploaded your list of contacts, you can choose to either include or exclude them from your campaign targeting, depending on your remarketing strategy.

Keyword Targeting

Keyword targeting allows you to connect with users based on words and phrases they’ve recently Tweeted or searched for on Twitter.This marketing capability allows you to reach your target audience when your business is most relevant to them.

There Are Two Types Of Keyword Targeting On Twitter:

Search
The phrases that people search for on Twitter are indicators of what’s top of mind for them in that moment. Keyword targeting enables you to target your Tweets so that they show up when people are searching for topics related to your business. This type of targeting is particularly effective during cultural, seasonal, or industry events that relate to your business.
Timeline
Tweets send important signals about what users are experiencing in the moment — their thoughts, feelings, wants and needs. With keyword targeting in timeline, you can act on these signals by targeting your Tweets to users based on something they’ve Tweeted.

By default, campaigns will appear in both search and timeline. If you’d like to focus on one or the other, you can customize where your Tweets appear.

How Keyword Targeting Works:
Enter the keywords you want to target and choose whether you want to use phrase match or unordered keyword match.

To ensure that you’re reaching the most comprehensive group of relevant users, keyword targeting defaults to a broad match, which accounts for slang, misspellings, synonyms and more. For example, if the keywords you’re targeting are “love coffee”, broad match may include terms like “love lattes”, “enjoy coffee”, and “loving coffees”.

Geo-Targeting

Twitter is a global product, but at times you may want to focus on users in specific locations to achieve your business objectives. Whether your ideal customers are located down the street, across the country or around the world, Twitter’s geo-targeting enables you to reach the audience that best fits the scope of your business and its aspirations.

Reach both broad and specific audiences through a combination of local, national and international level geo-targeting with Twitter Ads.

How To Geo-Target On Twitter:

You’ll see the option to geo-target your campaigns within the targeting section of your Twitter Ads interface when creating a new campaign or editing an existing one.
Type the country, state, metro area or zip code you’d like to target in the search bar. Hit enter/return/tab to auto-fill the highlighted option from the drop-down menu. In order for your geo-targeting to save correctly, it must appear below the drop-down menu.
To import multiple locations, press the Import Multiple Locations button. A blank screen will populate and you can enter states, regions or countries on separate lines. Separating by commas on the same line will not work. When finished, press the Verify Locations button. If a location is incorrect, the system will not save it and it will not appear below the drop-down menu.

When targeting multiple locations, keep in mind that if you target a broad area (e.g. Canada) as well as a more specific region within it (e.g. Nova Scotia), the scope of your geo-targeting will default to the larger region.

How To Target By Language:
The campaign settings default to targeting all languages, but you can limit targeting to users who understand specific languages if preferred.

For example, if you’re targeting users in Spain, France and Germany, but are running an English-language campaign, you may want to only target users in those countries who understand English.

Or, if you wanted to only-reach Spanish-speaking Americans, you could create a campaign that was geo-targeted to the United States and refine by users who understand Spanish.

Twitter uses e a number of different signals to determine a user’s language, including the language selected in a user’s profile settings and the languages that correspond to a user’s activity on Twitter. A user can be targetable by multiple languages if we infer that a user is multilingual.

Currently, Twitter’s self-service option can only support users who advertise in Afrikaans, Bahasa, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Finnish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Swedish or Danish.

Taken from the Twitter Marketing official YouTube

“The biggest mistake salespeople make is being inward-out versus outward-in.” — Greg Alexander ( Entrepreneur) @GregAlexander

#2 3 Simple Ways To Target On Twitter

Twitter continues to enable real-time, highly personalized information to the tune of 500 million tweets a day. But how can you use this information to target specific audience segments? Here are a few tips to help you better understand, identify, and target high-value audiences on Twitter.

1. Incorporate User-Based Signals
Twitter users provide a wealth of information based on the things they tweet about and the accounts they follow. So, whether you’re looking to target people who enjoy movies, or people who can’t get enough of Japanese horror films, Twitter will help you find and reach them. Consider these simple but effective options:

Interest targeting helps you reach people whose interests align with your business. Select from broad interest categories or custom segments.
Keyword targeting allows you to connect with users based on what they tweet about and search for on Twitter.
Follower targeting lets you target people who follow specific usernames. Consider targeting the followers of industry leaders or even your competition.

2. Adapt Your Strategy Throughout the Funnel
Regardless of where your customers are in the sales funnel, Twitter can help you find and reach them in a way that fits their current level of consideration. Mix and match these strategies for a full-funnel solution:

Top of the Funnel — Opt for interest, keyword, and follower targeting to reach a broad yet relevant audience. Showcase your business or brand and drive engagement.
Middle of the Funnel — Narrow your focus with tailored audiences to reach more high-value users. Also try partner audiences to reach users who’ve demonstrated high intent across other channels.
Bottom of the Funnel — Use retargeting strategies to reach users who are most likely to convert. Start by leveraging Twitter’s website tag to build high-value audience lists.

3. Make the Most of Your Data
Tailored Audiences help you make the most of your 1st-party data by targeting existing customers with highly relevant campaigns. Twitter provides a lot of flexibility so that you can use multiple sources and combinations:

Lists — Create audiences based on CRM data, newsletter distribution lists, people you’ve targeted in the past, etc.
Web Visits — Target users who’ve visited your website, and re-engage them with highly targeted and personalized campaigns.
Mobile App Data — Reach people who’ve downloaded or engaged with your mobile app, prompting them to use it again or adopt more features.

___________________________________________________________________

In this article, I have shown you how you can use Twitter targeting to reach your audiences using their various methods. This can help you to get your brand in front of the customers who are ready to buy from you, helping you increase your chances of generating revenue.

In my next article, I will be going through some of the best practices for targeting on Twitter as well as some tips to improve your Twitter targeting. Read the article, “How Do I Target Audiences On Twitter? — Part 3 (The Advanced Guide)” now.