Twitter launches events service for brands

Despite some recent stumbles, Twitter still takes center stage when people want to talk about big events, so it makes sense for the company to highlight those events for advertisers.

The social networking company is rolling out new tools on Thursday that will capitalize on the frenzy of chatter on its service that often accompanies real-world events.

Among other things, Twitter is also preparing a tool called Project Lighting, through which users can quickly join in discussions, and view the relevant content about events as they happen.

Advertisers can easily determine which events to align themselves with by filtering date, location and type of event. Marketers can drill down into each event to learn the size and demographics of the Twitter group that chatted about that event in the past.

Being able to schedule a campaign around a live event months ahead of time would seem to go against Twitter’s “in the moment” ethos – and the real-time marketing trend it spurred – because it could lead to ads like a boilerplate Super Bowl-related promoted tweet that’s formulated too early and doesn’t reflects events of the day. “We’re trying to automate it all for them”. The new tool makes it faster and more efficient. Advertisers will also have access to historical data about how the event has previously performed and what keywords and hashtags were associated with it.

Twitter’s event calendar will show happenings like sports games, holidays, music festivals, TV shows and political affairs across the U.S., the United Kingdom, France, Brazil and Japan.

“Twitter’s new event targeting capability was recently tested on two of our clients amidst their sponsor role of The Championships, Wimbledon 2015 and The Open, St. Andrews 2015”.

Ranadive said Twitter looks at “a variety of user engagement signals” to identify that audience – it’s not just people who are tweeting, but also those who are looking for and engaging with content around the event.