SHIFT adds a self-service Twitter tool with tailored audiences to its social marketing platform

SHIFT, a cloud-based social media marketing service, has officially launched its new self-service tool for advertising on Twitter. The new version offers all the features of Twitter’s ads API while also adding more granular tailored audiences and an easier way for global teams to coordinate their efforts.

Previously, SHIFT’s product bundled together Facebook and Twitter advertising into a single tab on its SaaS solution. However, the startup found that its clients wanted to take separate approaches to each network.

While advertisers can always head directly to Twitter to set up their ads, SHIFT’s platform offers several advantages. It allows individuals from multiple organizations, such as brand employees, an agency team and a Twitter sales rep, to communicate and share files on a single tool with sliding permissions for what everyone can see and do.

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In a sense, SHIFT is designed for the types of war-room situations that have become common for brands at events like the Super Bowl and the Oscars. As the lines between organic social content produced by a community management team and paid content from agencies and marketing teams blur, tools like SHIFT play an important role in keeping everyone organized and nimble.

James Borow, SHIFT’s CEO and co-founder, describes the product as an “open marketing cloud.” His mission is to create a centralized platform that can bring together data from different silos. The team has worked to include third-party API integrations for other marketing tools so that SHIFT can serve as the master layer.

Borow added that SHIFT is trying to unify “anything that can be unified,” while also recognizing the need for separate marketing processes for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Another benefit to using SHIFT is that it’s one of the few partners that supports Twitter’s deep features for CRM-based tailored audiences. With SHIFT, you can upload a list of your customers’ email addresses and then either reach out to them directly for promotions or exclude them from ads that would be irrelevant.

The company can also merge third-party data with the Twitter firehose in order to achieve even more advanced targeting. For instance, SHIFT mentioned that a movie studio could use a list of actor names and character names from a sequel to find influential Twitter users talking positively about the movie.

Twitter has emerged as a vital service for global communications, but its advertising efforts have lagged behind in taking advantage of its product’s valuable stores of data. SHIFT’s latest tool takes a step in the right direction with its tailored audience support and third-party integration.

Image credit: Charles Taylor / Shutterstock