1. Twitter Brings Ollie Killick, 18/04/13
Keyword Jesse
Targeting to Wolfersberger
Social
Background
Twitter has announced a significant enhancement to its Promoted Tweets. “Keyword targeting in
timeline” allows brands to show ads to users who have tweeted or interacted with a tweet that
contains specific words and phrases. This new functionality gives advertisers a paid search style
model within Twitter similar to Google’s.
Details
The process works similar to paid search. Advertisers create a keyword list, set a bid, and when a
user tweets or interacts with a tweet that uses words that match something in the keyword list, they
are served an ad. Unlike search, the user is not served the ad immediately; instead, it will show up
in the user’s timeline within the next several minutes. For example, Bob sends a tweet about
looking for a new computer. If Dell has the words “new computer” in its keyword list, the next time
Bob refreshes his timeline he gets served a Promoted Tweet from Dell. Further, if Bob does not send
a tweet, but instead interacts (replies, favorites or retweets) with someone else’s tweet that
references a “new computer,” he could also be served a Dell Promoted Tweet.
Twitter will launch keyword targeting with two types of keyword matching:
 Phrase Targeting – A series of words in the exact order, with no words in between.
 Unordered Match – A series of words that appear in any order, with words in between.
These targeting options are not as robust as Google or Bing, but they are a good first step. Twitter
will offer some keyword tools at launch to help marketers with word tenses and plurals. Also, bulk
keyword management is supported immediately. Users of Buddy Media and SHIFT will see the
changes incorporated into both technologies within the week. The biggest issue with match types is
the lack of negative keywords. In SEM, negative keywords keep brands from wasting spend on
irrelevant queries or being associated with unfavorable keywords. In social, there is an additional
use: sentiment. Twitter will use an algorithm to help identify negative sentiment within a tweet, but
language interpretation can be extremely hard for an algorithm, particularly when hashtags are
involved. It is easy to see how an algorithm could miss the nuance of a tweet such as: “Can’t wait to
eat at McDonald’s again! #notreally #neveragain.” The addition of negative keywords should help to
ease these concerns, but there may never be a 100% accurate sentiment solution.
Implications
Keyword targeting in timeline is a smart move by Twitter that will further enhance the appeal of
Promoted Tweets. Performance remains to be seen, but, in theory, keyword targeting will be a large
boost to the efficiency of Promoted Tweets. Twitter is now a “pull marketing” platform where the
user first expresses intent. Maybe most exciting, marketers can still make use of three targeting
options – location, device and gender – in conjunction with keyword targeting, this gives a great
level of relevance. The enhancement also allows for scale and speed of what was once a very
manual process – responding directly to Tweets. It will allow marketers to have larger keyword lists
and to serve ads to users within minutes of their tweet.
Summary
Even with concerns about match types taken into account, keyword targeting in timeline is a win for
marketers. Keyword targeting in timeline will allow advertisers to quickly respond to users whilst
the interest is still there, and will prove especially valuable in when used in conjunction with
Twitter’s other targeting tools.