People use Twitter to serve their interests. It is no longer the platform where the majority of folks just post what they had for lunch, it's no longer the platform where folks give updates on their day-to-day activities, but instead, it's built around specific niche interests and we can target that using advertising. In fact, recent studies have shown that Twitter is fragmented and instead of having broad interests, most folks use the platform for specific interests. If you look at the graph here, you can see that we have specific use cases that are well-documented such as folks use Twitter to get information on science, folks use Twitter to understand about what's happening in their city. So this is the first important question that I'll pose to you today as you begin to decide whether Twitter is an optimal advertising platform for your objectives. Does your product have interests? Are you opening a running store? Are you a niche bakery dedicated to gluten-free foods? Are the organic provider of a specific food product? These are all niche interests that have vibrant conversations on Twitter. If you can answer this with a yes, then you may have a good use case for using Twitter ads, but ads isn't for the vague. So if you'd just like to promote your cafe and your cafe is really designed for comfort and a lower price point that may not have this specific niche interest that has a vibrant discussion on the platform. Think about it like this, if you think of your target audiences broad such as a broad age range or maybe possibly everyone in a specific geographic area. Then it might not be the best platform to use. What I mean by that is Twitter is designed for specific types of interests in conversations and plugging ads into those conversations and interests tends to work well. However, if you serve a broad audience it might not be the best advertising platform for you. One way to find out if your audience is active on Twitter is to simply just take a look. So think of certain keywords that map to interests. So on the left, we have here a really specific niche interests that tends to work really well. So one way to understand whether Twitter is an optimal platform for you is to really just think about keywords related to your product or service. So here I have a very specific set of interests [inaudible] in to Tweet Deck which is the social listening tool, it's officially provided by Twitter. I've just really created some key terms around specific types of jobs just to see if there's a lot of chatter. So here I have PR professors on the first column on the left. So let's say I offer a niche product in public relations and I want to know if there are PR professors out there that I can reach to tell about this product. Let's say this product is an educational tool that teaches folks how to do public relations better. Well, I can see that not only are there key hashtags dedicated to threaded discussions, but there actually are many messages in a given day all geared towards public relations educators or public relations professors. So I can really quickly understand that, yes, there is a vibrant group of PR professors that are out there that we could leverage with Twitter ads, that we could reach with Twitter ads. The second example here in the middle is a pizza, and I always use pizza as an example of a niche interests that just doesn't exist in the real world when you actually get down to Twitter and I just want you to think about it like this. Do people tweet about pizza when they eat it? Do you tweet about pizza when you eat it? Do your friends Tweet about pizza when they eat it.? What I'm trying to get at here is that certain behaviors just don't manifest themselves well in the platform. It is no longer the platform when we talk about the lunch we have, it's no longer the platform where we give regular updates throughout our day. So we really have a hard time knowing whether someone really is a pizza fan or not. One way around this is to look at folks that follow accounts that are related to pizza. So if you follow Dominoes and follow Pizza Hut, there is a higher likelihood that you are a pizza fan but the problem is that most people don't follow brands, and even if they do they tend not to follow brands that are interesting. So Wendy's has a large following on Twitter because of its aforementioned personality but it doesn't necessarily mean that everyone that follows Wendy's is actually passionate about hamburgers, right? So there's a lot of error in this data and in fact when research has been done to see if people can be targeted on account parameters alone the results are mixed solely trying to target ads to people that follow specific accounts. That strategy doesn't always work or doesn't always pay off with optimal efficiency. It depends on the interest. You could probably make an argument, on the other hand, that if people follow Ad Age and other marketing-related accounts, it probably means that those folks are actually interested in marketing. The broader consumer interests tend to be harder to actually correlate. Finally, on the right, we have an example of a major league baseball team, The Pirates, and you can see that there are people that regularly tweet about The Pirates. It is a safe inference to make that these people are interested in The Pirates either positively or negatively. At the time of filming this, I can tell you that most Pirates fans are probably [inaudible] but that still means they're interested in the pirates. So if we want to sell baseball products to interested consumers or people that are interested in baseball, just simply using the handles associated with Major League Baseball teams could be an appropriate way to build a targeting perimeter. Consumers also tend to follow accounts associated with specific products. So on the left, we have an example of a Twitter account that's dedicated to serving information about Android-related consumer products or consumer technology products. So Android phones, Android tablets, and the like. On the right, we have the equivalent account for Apple products and so these accounts have vibrant followings because these accounts are dedicated to delivering content based on those interests and if we wanted to build some type of targeting parameters around well, I want to reach folks that are really interested in Android devices. Well, this would be one way to do it is by simply looking at these people that follow these accounts and using these as a decision on whether someone's season out or not. There are other types of interests such as running. So Runner's World is really well followed. It has 1.7 million followers. Similarly, Epicurious has a large following and it is dedicated towards upscale culinary cooking, and so that's really interesting. So we might want to use Epicurious as a base audience of people that are really interested in food. Twitter also has trends at a local level. What I mean by that is we actually can look at what people are talking about in a specific area. So on the right, you can see that we're looking at Denver trends and these Denver trends add a local flavor to them. Some of the trending things are nationals, such as national Girlfriend's day other trends are local. This is actually at the State level, Colorado day, and you can actually see that there are over 2000 tweets in that one day, and these are people that are all talking about the State of Colorado. So you can see that brands often take advantage of these local trends. So here's an example of a tweet that came from New Belgium Brewing. It's a Colorado brewery and it actually is trying to leverage that by tying in a promotion. So this is a nice tactic that you can use on Twitter. Taking a trending item and then attaching your brand message to it. Now I'm not saying that this is the only way to build Twitter content, because if you simply try to attach yourself to trending items you might be seen as lacking a central voice, and that's something that you'll want to consider as you're building your account. But it is one way to leverage local happenings and to connect with your audience in a genuine way if you are a local business.
