Twitter rolled out Tuesday, May 7, a new feature that allows advertisers to reach out to a wider audience by targeting language.
In a bid to attract more advertisers to its microblogging service, Twitter launched a new feature that allows advertisers to target certain languages in their promoted tweets and promoted accounts. With this new feature, advertisers can now target 20 different languages and users can now see "highly relevant ads" in their own language.
"Language targeting can benefit marketers who want to reach a global audience with language-specific messaging, or who are in countries where large populations speak multiple languages," says Twitter group product manager Nipoon Malhotra in a blog post.
"For example, an advertiser who wants to Promote Tweets to Italian-speaking soccer fans during the World Cup can use Italian language targeting to reach the right users around the world," he explains.
Advertising on Twitter already targets interest, keyword, gender and location. The new language targeting feature will work in conjunction with these features. As an example, Twitter offers a travel advertiser who wants to target Spanish-speaking tourists in the U.S. by combining targeting by language (Spanish) and interest (travel) as well as geo-targeting (U.S.).
Advertisers will find the new feature simple and easy-to-use. They can simply use the language they want to target and all users who understand that language will see the Promoted Tweet or Promoted Account. So how does Twitter know what languages a user can understand?
Aside from the preferred language settings on the user's account, Twitter also uses "a number of different signals," including the language/s the Twitter uses on his account. Twitter also said it can determine if a user is bi-lingual or multi-lingual and can send Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts in various languages the user's way.
Twitter is not the first social network to introduce language targeting. Facebook has been promoting language targeted ads since 2009 and currently supports more than 50 different languages. It's not exactly groundbreaking for Twitter, but the new feature, if effective, will help Twitter improve the experience for advertisers.
A huge majority, or around 90%, of sales during the first quarter of the fiscal year came from advertising, so it is not surprising for Twitter to bolster its advertising business with better features for its Ads API. Lately, the company also purchased MoPub, a mobile advertising network that describes itself as "the world's largest mobile ad server."
