Twitter’s Audience Insights will supercharge understanding of users

Twitter has unveiled a new analytics tool to help marketers better understand the people we are interacting with on the social network.

Audience Insights will allow users to gather a wealth of information from organic tweets on their feed – giving them a much better grasp of what makes their audience tick.

Knowing and understanding your audience is absolutely critical for a successful campaign – so this feature will reap rewards for brands when put in the right hands.

It will allow us to learn more about followers, and the people who engage with our Tweets, helping to tailor targeting and content accordingly. Data points include demographics, lifestyle, and purchasing behaviour and much more. It’s a treasure trove of data.

Twitter explains how this works in practice on their advertising blog:

“…if you’re running a campaign to increase awareness about a new cosmetics line, you can use this tool to learn about your potential customers on Twitter — the beauty products they’ve recently purchased, what fashion trends they’re interested in and even TV viewing behaviour. Based on this information, you can identify the best segments to target within Twitter Ads, along with which creative — such as a Vine or video clip — your audience will find most compelling.”

With the lines between PR and digital becoming increasingly blurred and more closely integrated, agencies should be licking their lips at the potential this can deliver for clients. Essentially, we will know a lot more about who we are aiming to reach before hitting go on a campaign.

Paid-for social is a key weapon in our arsenal and this will be supercharged by having this ocean of information at our fingertips. It will create better targeting and more streamlined campaigns, which will lead to greater ROI for clients.

It’s a strong move by Twitter which is squaring up to the likes of Facebook and LinkedIn which currently lets you target by age, location, gender, job and interests. Twitter takes this one step further and as it continues to beef up how the platform is monetised, we’re excited to see how this new feature will be broadened out over the coming months.