Today in Social

Twitter is adding a critical new targeting capability to its Promoted Tweets and Accounts ads that run in its feed: topical targeting. This is a big deal, because Twitter’s “interest graph” could in theory be a very powerful ad targeting mechanism. Advertisers can still promote to followers and try to reach Twitter users with topical interests similar to those of  followers. Advertisers can also customize the new topic categories by adding in followers and specific users as models of topical interests. Of course it all depends on how good Twitter’s analysis of topics is, but that’s its Big Data science bet. Twitter is also lowering the minimum bid price in the auction-based system it uses for ad bidding, and it will still algorithmically determine topic relevance on those ads. Naturally, Twitter won’t say much about how it makes the sausage.