For years, Twitter has shined during big events – whether they be scheduled events like The Oscars, Super Bowl, or Grammys, or breaking news. Twitter’s fine for the mundane day-to-day, but when something big is happening, more people flock to Twitter to see what everyone (friends and the famous) are saying.
It makes sense then, that Twitter would allow marketers to target ads based on events. Well, it does. Now.
In how-was-that-not-already-a-thing news, Twitter has just unveiled event targeting.
“Millions of people rely on Twitter to discover and engage with a variety of live events. Whether it’s a presidential election, Coachella, Mother’s Day or the Super Bowl, if it’s happening in the world, it’s happening on Twitter. Starting today, advertisers will be able to reach audiences interested in these events with a new feature called event targeting,” says Twitter’s Dinkar Jain. “With event targeting, you can activate around live moments, quickly and easily. We’ll help you discover and plan for these moments, learn more about the participating audiences through valuable insights, and with one click, create a campaign that delivers the right message to just the right users as the event unfolds.”
Marketers now have something called the “event calendar” (seen above) that shows upcoming events across the world on any given day. Twitter says the event calendar will show events related to sports, festivals, holidays, TV, music, and politics on five countries – the US, UK, France, Japan, and Brazil.
Once marketers have determined on which event they want to target users, they can see a detailed breakdown of past tweet activity for said events so they can better choose secondary targeting like gender or device.
This new ad targeting based on events seems to be timed well, as Twitter is gearing up to unveil a new feature that highlights events and puts them front and center on Twitter.com and its apps – for both logged-in and logged-out users.