Zeenews Bureau/>
New Delhi: Microblogging site Twitter will now allow advertisers to directly target users with "promoted tweets" based on the interests they reveal in their tweets.
Twitter will no longer remain a `dumb` bulletin board where nearly 400 million micro-messages are posted daily. The social networking site has moved to a strategy of actively sifting through what each user is reading and tweeting in order to discern their interests.
"We`re taking an important next step by allowing you to target your Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts campaigns to a set of interests that you explicitly choose," Twitter product management director Kevin Weil said in a blog post.
In an effort to draw advertisers, the company has also slashed the minimum price of `promoted tweets` from 50 cents each to just a penny.
CEO Dick Costolo has said in recent months that his company`s value lies in its ability to mine its flow of information to build “an interest graph” showing its users` preference profiles — which could be used by marketers to deliver targeted and relevant ads.
As part of its new targeting feature, Twitter will now let advertisers to send paid ads, in the form of tweets, to users who are interested in any of the roughly 350 topics that Twitter has identified.
Since its launch in March 2006, Twitter is hoping to catch up to other consumer Internet companies that have found varying degrees of success by using technology to serve better-targeted ads.
For years, Google has reaped huge profits by displaying ads based on what a user searches for in its search engine, while Facebook encourages users to proactively input their “likes.” But Twitter, by contrast, has long faced the challenge of indirectly inferring these preferences, something that marketers find less attractive for their needs.
(With agency inputs)
