Gnip's Audience API is now Generally Available

By
Tuesday, 12 July 2016

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Gnip’s Audience API, following a valuable Public Beta period that was launched last fall at our Flight Developer Conference.

In talking with customers about the new types of data they would most like to see from Twitter, one of the top requests was to be able to define and describe audiences of interest as well as to have visibility into the demographic characteristics of these audiences for brand clients. After all, brands that have a better understanding of the makeup of customers and prospects are able to make smarter and more strategic product and marketing decisions.

Throughout our conversations, several product requirements emerged. Our audience insights service must:

  • Deliver information not available via analysis of public content
  • Return insights in real time
  • Seamlessly integrate alongside existing Gnip APIs
  • Protect user privacy

Over the course of the last 9 months, we have taken great care to balance these four elements, while continuing to add features and functionality to the API. In addition to making the Audience API more widely available, we are excited to offer brands more direct visibility into the audiences they know and interact with, both on and off of Twitter.

The Audience API

At its core, the Audience API is a flexible service that allows brands to define an audience of interest in order to instantly learn more about the demographic makeup of the users in that group. One input to the Audience API is a list of Twitter User IDs. Customers can use the Audience API with Gnip’s Full-Archive Search or PowerTrack APIs to instantly understand the audiences engaged with any topic, conversation, influencer or event.

Instantly understand the audience behind any topic, any conversation, any influencer, any event.

John HeywoodProduct Manager, Audience API

Proprietary user models

The Audience API allows customers to retrieve demographic data across 10 user models, as well as at the intersection of a combination of any two. Realizing that these models also power Twitter’s suite of advertising products, it has never been easier for brands to understand target audiences and create content that resonates with each group:

Gnip's Audience API is now Generally Available

Privacy-forward approach to audience exploration

At Twitter, everything we do is oriented around our users, and the Audience API is no different. Of the four product requirements shared above, the most important has been to protect our users and preserve the trust they have in Twitter that their data will be used in an appropriate manner. The approach we have pursued is grounded in probabilistic data aggregation and differential privacy, and our continued work in this area has allowed us to maintain the same levels of protection while making important product improvements throughout the Audience API Beta — namely, reducing the minimum audience size a customer can query from 10,000 users to 500, and greatly reducing the reporting thresholds on the output of the API.

Explore audiences without the heavy lifting

While the Audience API allows customers to construct their own audiences of Twitter user IDs, we’ve regularly heard that customers want to more easily learn about audiences they already know, and to allow brands to build audiences that are constructed via owned data.

We listened, and are excited to share several new methods of audience construction via the Audience API. Starting today, you can now define audiences in three new ways:

  • Followers of any handle: Instantly create audience segments based on the followers of any public Twitter handle, without needing to download IDs from our public API.
  • Brands’ owned organic audiences: Create audience segments made up of users that have seen a brand’s owned, organic Tweets over the last 90 days. Then, dive a layer deeper by constructing a segment made up of users that have engaged (clicked, liked, RT, etc.) with the brand’s organic content over the same 90 day period.
  • First-party data (via Tailored Audiences): Create audience segments based on lists of email addresses, phone numbers, or mobile advertising IDs, or based on Twitter users who have visited a brand’s website, that have been matched through Tailored Audiences. For the first time, your brand customers can programmatically harness Twitter’s demographic models to explore the characteristics of groups they know off-platform.

Audience insights in action

KarmaPulse, an early Beta customer out of Mexico City, has been using the Audience API to help political campaigns better understand the interests and needs of their respective voter bases. As millions of Mexicans use Twitter as a real-time connection to the political landscape, it is the best place to connect with others and be heard. For candidate teams, the public discourse provides a strong signal that can be used to identify target audiences, craft key messages and understand how these messages are resonating.

By leveraging the Audience API, KarmaPulse offers candidate teams the ability to explore the characteristics of groups of Twitter users that are engaged in specific political conversation, in real-time. By learning about users’ interests that extend beyond politics, campaigns can segment groups by gender and location, and discover creative new ways for attracting potential voters.

As a result of these efforts, 77% of KarmaPulse’s clients won their corresponding races. Individual candidates did not win these elections, but rather their well-managed campaigns did.

Karma Pulse is now able to analyze audiences on Twitter and discover information that enables us to build common ground between our clients and the users like never before.

Ximena Iñigo RubíCo-Founder & Director of KarmaPulse

 From São Paulo, Brazil, iCustomer Plusoft is another early adopter of the Audience API that has integrated the product into an existing customer solution. One of their business solutions helps brands handle unexpected event and PR crises, and iCustomer Plusoft has found that the more they understand the affected audience, the more effectively they can craft an appropriate response.

In addition, iCustomer Plusoft helps advertisers plan and execute cross-channel advertising buys. In one example, they worked with a local telecommunications firm to evaluate whether or not television advertising spots were reaching the appropriate audience targets. By identifying people talking about these campaigns on Twitter, iCustomer Plusoft cross-referenced geographic data at the metro level with gender, TV shows, and interest data. The result: a set of actionable insights for the brand, including a recommendation not only of which programs to consider for future ad buys, but guidance on what the viewers of each program are interested in.

Gnip's Audience API is now Generally Available

   Image: Mapping Audiences of Interest on Twitter with iCustomer Plusoft

Get started today

For more details about the Audience API, please read our new support documentation and contact your Gnip account manager or data-sales@twitter.com to learn how easily this product can integrate – or augment – your existing suite of customer offerings. We look forward to helping you and your customers find valuable signal through with the demographic data available only through the Gnip Audience API.