More search options, and keeping up with trends

Thursday, 13 December 2012

Every day, millions of people use Twitter search to understand what’s happening in real time. Search is also where we debuted the very first Promoted Tweets back in April 2010, and it remains a great way to reach a relevant audience with your content. Today, we are excited to bring a number of targeting improvements to Promoted Tweets in search results.

Marketers can now select from three different matching options when entering keywords: exact match, phrase match, and basic keyword match. We’ve now launched negative keyword targeting if you want to restrict your Promoted Tweets from showing up when users search for certain keywords. For instance, if you sell bacon, you can now keep your campaigns more than six degrees apart from Kevin Bacon by using “Kevin” as a negative keyword.

To make it easy to tie in your Twitter marketing with your existing online efforts, we’ve created a bulk import tool, accessible from the “Import multiple keywords” button as shown in the screenshot below. The tool accepts exported keyword lists from other search advertising platforms or simple cut-and-paste from a document. 

Twitter Search

But even more exciting to us is the new option to automatically match your Promoted Tweets in search to relevant and related trending topics. Trends can rise and fall quickly with world events, TV shows and sporting matches, or memes like #OneOfMyFavoriteMovies. If you use this new matching option (which is enabled by default for new campaigns), we use relevance signals about your Promoted Tweets and the Trend itself to help increase your campaign’s coverage automatically. For example, if a celebrity’s pregnancy news starts trending, and you’re a retailer of baby clothing, your Promoted Tweet may be entered into the auction for that trending search.

If you are a current advertiser and would like to know more about how this works, check out our Help Center page.  If you are not yet an advertiser, click here to learn more about advertising on Twitter.

Both the automated matching to trending topics and the new keyword matching options are available worldwide today. We hope that the combination of greater control and more powerful automation will lead to even higher ROI for your next Promoted Tweets campaign.

Posted by
Kevin Weil (@kevinweil)
Director, Product Management