Both Facebook and Twitter are rolling out new targeted advertising options as they seek to better monetise their platforms, while trying not to sacrifice the user experience.
Twitter will now allow marketers to target Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts campaigns to users based on their interests. Marketers have previously been able to target their campaigns to users who had similar profiles to their followers.
“By targeting people's topical interests, you will be able to connect with a greater number of users and deliver tailored messages to people who are more likely to engage with your Tweets,” says Twitter's director of product management, Kevin Weil. “When people discover offers and messages about the things they care about on Twitter, it's good for both marketers and users.”
Marketers can target over 350 interest categories on the micro-blogging platform. Weil says if marketers want to be more precise in their targeting, they can create custom segments by specifying certain @usernames that are relevant to the campaign.
“Custom segments let you reach users with similar interests to that @username's followers; they do not let you specifically target the followers of that @username. If you're promoting your indie band's next tour, you can create a custom audience by adding @usernames of related bands, thus targeting users with the same taste in music,” explains Weil.
“We've always taken a thoughtful approach to monetisation, and early results show interest targeting creates a better experience for marketers and users.”
Twitter has, however, been under fire lately as it has been criticised for seeking more control over its ecosystem, in order to maintain its value proposition for advertisers. As dissatisfaction with Twitter has grown in the developer community, one entrepreneur from San Francisco, Dalton Caldwell, is pushing to create a new service called App.net that will be “what Twitter could have been”.
According to Caldwell, Twitter has made a mistake by choosing to monetise the platform through advertising rather than building it around its real-time API. “If you are building an advertising/media business, it would then follow that you need to own all of the screen real-estate that users see. The next logical step would be to kill all third-party clients, and lock down the data in the global firehose in order to control the 'content',” says Caldwell.
Facebook factor
As Facebook continues to face post-IPO pressure to better monetise its platform, the largest social network in the world is also rolling out new targeted advertising features for marketers. First reported by Inside Facebook, the social network has now confirmed that the new features are real and are going live soon.
The new targeting is based on customer lists advertisers or a business have already created and allows them to use this information to find those customers on Facebook (by cross-checking their user IDs, e-mail addresses or phone numbers).
According to Facebook, the information included in the customer contact lists uploaded by businesses will be hashed so Facebook itself won't have access to it. The Facebook user data sent back to the businesses will be similarly hashed, and both sets of hashed data will be compared to create a list of users whose details match up. The advertiser can then target this group of users, or specific age segments within that group.
One of the key use cases for the new feature is where a business targets its existing customers to ask them to “Like” their Facebook page. Facebook has reiterated that the new feature is more about giving advertisers more targeting options rather than providing them with new user data.
It has been noted that privacy advocates may still take issue with customer data being used in this way. Facebook has, however, reportedly said that businesses will have to seek permission from their customers to use their data for marketing campaigns before being allowed to proceed. How this process will be monitored remains to be seen.
The feature will reportedly be available to all advertisers who receive support from Facebook as of next week.
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