On July 23, 2015, Twitter announced a new feature that allows advertisers to use major events around the world in their campaigns. This new feature called “Event Targeting” reaches the audiences of events such as the Super Bowl, Mother’s Day, the Grammys, Wimbledon, Valentine’s Day or the FIFA World Cup.

As a real-time, marketing leader of social networks, Twitter’s new event targeting feature makes it possible for businesses and brands to reach people involved or interested in a real-life event using the network. This approach is far better than the manual efforts marketers have been using that include mere guesswork of what accounts, hashtags or keywords to target. Instead, they can use Twitter’s event targeting as a tool for simplifying, informing and automating the process. With this tool, marketers can learn about audiences with meaningful insights and build a campaign delivering the best message for the right users at the unfolding of the event.

The Three Main Components of Twitter’s Event Targeting Feature

1. World Calendar – Lets you know what is happening as well as where and when.

   • The Twitter calendar highlights the main events around the world that are related to television, holidays, music, politics and festivals.
   • The events highlighted are those that take place in the United States, France, United Kingdom, Japan and Brazil.
   • Filters allow users to narrow their focus by event type, date and location.

2. Insights – You may have found the event you consider to be perfect, but do you know who would most likely participate? The insight feature will provide you with this info.

   • Data based on the past performance by participants on Twitter will let you know exactly how many people have tweeted about and event, the number of people they have reached, what devices were used and the audience demographics.
   • You can find and understand the ideas of marketers’ content of the past. This is done by displaying the most popular keywords, tweets and hashtags receiving the greatest amount of engagement.
3. Activation – With one simple click, you can launch your ad campaign by using Twitter’s targeting events. This event targeting feature can be easily combined with Twitter’s other ad features.

Image Source: Twitter

Ad Features of Twitter to Boost Your Campaigns

By combining Twitter’s Event Targeting with their ad features, you can create a successful advertising campaign and outstanding audience engagement. For help in building expertise to use Twitter’s Event Targeting as well as their real-time marketing capabilities, you should refer to the Twitter Flight School https://blog.twitter.com/2015/takeflight-with-our-redesigned-twitter-flight-school that was launched last year. The flight school has recently been redesigned to provide an experience that is more interactive. It also features Twitter’s recent products such as video that will certainly meet all your advertising needs.

Ad features for your campaigns include:

– Advertisers can target through either a wireless carrier or new, up-to-date devices.

– In March of 2015, Twitter launched their new “Partner Audiences”. Partner Audiences provides marketers with a high ROI from their ad campaigns and opportunities to target users who have given powerful signals of interest on Twitter. Acxiom and Datalogix can provide over 1,000 partner audiences. In order to add partner audiences to your campaign, you should go to the “behaviors” section of your campaign creation page. Then, select both a category as well as a sub-category. For the next and final step, select a partner audience. You may select several if you wish.

– The annual #Twitter4Politics was held last week bringing together 200 Washington insiders. However, the insights emerging from them could be applied to any brands wanting to build attraction and build action. The following tips emerged from the Washington event:

1. Influencers Should Be Targeted – Who are the people who by sharing their opinions can sway others to agree with them? They are often analysts, reporters, moms and celebrities. They lead the conversations about brands and products and Twitter is a great way for marketers to reach them.
2. Real Time Responding – Just as voters expect a fast response from elected officials, customers do also expect a quick response from brands. The real-time nature of Twitter is what makes it so valuable to advertisers.
3. Show Your Personality – Whether seeking election or selling a brand, marketers should show the real you especially their lighter sides. This is a way to use Twitter and humanize your brand.
4. Listening and Engaging – While Twitter allows elected officials voters a platform to talk about both their support and frustrations, it also creates an opportunity to link consumers with brands.
5. Testing – Twitter allows advertisers to quickly find out what works. There is no better platform where marketers can learn their audiences’ preferences and generate leads.