A guide to event targeting on Twitter

Friday, 25 March 2016

Live cultural moments are amplified on social media every day around the world. From fashion weeks to sporting events and holidays, hundreds of millions of people turn to Twitter first to know what’s happening right now. For brands who want to engage with this live audience, Twitter created event targeting. It gives advertisers a fast and easy way to reach a target demographic that’s actively interested in an event.

Ready to join the crowd? We’re with you. But before you start a campaign, here are some tips to boost your brand’s visibility and return on investment during the next event:

1. Discover events that align with your audience

With our events calendar, you can find an event that attracts your desired demographic, and target it with one click. You’ll find audience insights like gender and device breakdown to help you zero in on the right marketing opportunity.

Keep in mind, some well-aligned events won’t be so obvious. Discover events that weren’t on your radar by filtering for event type, date and location.

A guide to event targeting on Twitter

2. Leave the targeting to us

We’ll broadcast your Promoted Tweets and videos to your target audience, based on who’s actively participating in an event and following along for updates, helping you get in front of the right people, at the moment they’re most engaged. You can layer on demographic and geographic targeting to refine your audience. But we don’t recommend using Tailored Audiences or additional targeting — it may limit your campaign’s reach.

A guide to event targeting on Twitter

Event targeting is built to make sure you won’t get mixed up in extraneous conversations. We analyze the content of Tweets, relying keywords and other contextual cues to zero in on only the conversations that are related to the event you want to target.

3. Get inspiration from successful campaigns in previous years

The event summary page also features Tweets sent by various people or brands during the previous year’s event. As you plan your campaign, check to see what kinds of content got the most Retweets and engagement. Look for a unique dimension you can bring to the conversation. What is the discussion missing? What is no one talking about?

For example, instead of focusing on the Super Bowl itself, @CourtyardHotels toured the game’s host city, San Francisco, where antics from comedian Ben Schwartz showed the softer side of NFL personalities like coach Rex Ryan and quarterback Kirk Cousins.

4. Start engaging before the event

We start tracking an event audience 30 days before an event begins, giving you plenty of time to plan your campaign. Seed interest by sending Tweets early on, and you’ll increase the list of people engaging with the event (and your campaign). As activity levels rise, your connections multiply and you’ll find yourself at the heart of a growing crowd.

@adidasHoops began targeting the 2015 NBA All-Star game nearly two weeks before the event. Videos brought early exposure to its #NeverDoubt campaign and created continued engagement in the days leading up to the event.

5. Capitalize on spikes in the conversation with quick promote

While you can’t predict some of the real-time, spontaneous moments during an event, you can prepare for them. During this year’s Academy Awards Show, conversation reached a fever pitch when Leonardo DiCaprio was voted Best Actor. It wasn’t as if people were caught by surprise, but at 440,000 Tweets per minute, it was a perfect opportunity for advertisers to jump in on the fly and increase their exposure.

A guide to event targeting on Twitter

When a new discussion spikes, use quick promote to respond in seconds and put yourself at the center of a conversation as it happens.

6. Build 360° engagement by aligning multiple channels

If you’re promoting your brand through various online and offline channels, tie those efforts to your Twitter event marketing strategy. To go along with the All Day Breakfast they were serving at last year’s Latin Grammys, McDonald’s Tweeted a video of choreographer Chachi Gonzales’s hungry dance to give people at home a taste of the fun.

By adding event targeting to television campaigns and offline sponsorships, you drive home a memorable message and gain access to a larger audience—one that can help create an echo effect across your entire campaign.

Event targeting on Twitter makes it easy to connect your brand to a live audience during major events. Reach out to your account rep to learn how event targeting can double your engagement rate, or visit ads.twitter.com/events to learn more about upcoming events and start your next campaign.