Twitter introduces language targeting for promoted tweets and accounts across 20 languages

Twitter today launched language targeting for promoted tweets and promoted accounts. As a result, advertisers can now target both in 20 different languages while users will be able to see “highly relevant ads” in their language.

Twitter says it uses “a number of different signals” to determine a user’s language, not just the language selected in their profile settings. The company also looks at the languages that correspond to their activity on Twitter, meaning a user can be targeted by multiple languages if Twitter decides that a user is multilingual.

For advertisers, using the feature is a very straightforward two-step process:

Here’s how Twitter explains the benefits of the new feature:

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. 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.

Other social networks have had this for a long time, so it’s not exactly groundbreaking. It’s more of a “finally” for Twitter, which probably should have offered the option to advertisers long before it went public.

Thankfully, Twitter already offers other targeting options based on interest, keyword, gender, location, and tailored audience segments. As such, advertisers will be able to use language targeting in conjunction with these to optimize their ROI. Twitter offers an example: a travel brand that wants to reach Spanish-speaking travelers in the US can combine US geo-targeting, travel-category interest targeting, and Spanish language targeting.

To advertisers, that sounds great. Whether the feature works as intended, and how well, remains to be seen.

See also – Twitter passes 255m monthly active users, 198m mobile users, and sees 80% of advertising revenue from mobile and Twitter opens its advertising doors to small businesses in the UK, Ireland and Canada

Top Image Credit: Scott Beale/Laughing Squid