Targeted tweets were recently announced by Twitter, and it is still a little unclear as to what they are and how targeted tweets can be used.

There has veen quite a bit of speculation about how Twitter planned to monetize their audiences. Sure, there are 500 million or so accounts on the microblogging network, but where does the company stand to generate revenue from those numbers? Last week, Twitter unveiled their answer to that question: Targeted Tweets.

We have all heard of Promoted Tweets – essentially, these are tweets designed to reach a broader audience based on a select criteria picked by the user paying for the ad. Well, this next generation of Promoted Tweets takes targeting your Twitter audience to a whole new level. With targeted tweets, marketers can take a wealth of new steps to increase engagement and conversion rates. Namely, tweets can be targeted by location, platform (e.g. mobile) and even outside an account’s follower base.

This can mean a lot as far as Twitter marketing is concerned. Below are a few things to consider when it comes to advertising and marketing your brand on Twitter with the new targeted tweets.

Promote for an Audience in Mind

Promoted Tweets, as they were originally designed, were intended to reach a broader audience, and not much else. Thus, tailoring your tweets for a specific audience would not necessarily do much good seeing as how you did not have control over those viewing your message. Targeted tweets changes that.

Now, as noted above, you can target your content to a very specific audience. Therefore, you should not be sending out the generic promotional 140-character message. Pick your audience based on the given criteria and write a message for them. People do not simply want to see a piece of advertising from a brand on Twitter. They want to feel like a brand is talking directly to them. So write for your audience. You’d be surprised at the success you find – initial reports are showing engagement rates of 11%. That’s high by any standards.

Get Mobile

Targeting messages by platform means that you can now advertise to people on the go. That’s a whole new feature for Twitter. Sure, their smartphone app is great for on-the-go users, but for marketers, there was no real way of marketing directly to smartphone users – until now.

The ability to send targeted tweets to mobile users means that you can now create mobile campaigns specifically for Twitter. And, considering the fact that the pricing scheme for these tweets is based on clicks, you don’t have to worry about spending on a mobile-oriented campaign that is seen on desktops.

Use Your Analytics

Along with these new changes on the frontend comes some new features in the backend. The analytics featured with these targeted tweets means that you can be monitoring the progress and success of different campaigns in real time. It might be a CPC-styled campaign, but you need to pay attention to your insights!

With the new targeting abilities of promoted tweets, you need to be constantly reshaping and evolving your campaigns in order to reach the largest, relevant and targeted audience available. These analytics help you do that and they help you in a timely fashion. So instead of the set-it-and-forget-it mentality that many marketers take to social campaigns, keep an eye on your analytics and see how you can further optimize your targeting strategy to get even more out of your Twitter marketing efforts.

These are some exciting changes for Twitter. The ability to create targeted tweets means that marketers can now go a step further with their Twitter marketing and advertising strategies. Just when people thought Twitter was at a standstill, they release an exciting new feature.

Do you plan on using Twitter’s new targeted tweets feature? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!