Twitter to provide brands with more info about their audience

Alan Littler

Microblogging site Twitter has recently announced that it intends to open Gnip and its Audience API to all brands, so that they can access data about anyone who interacts with their tweets.

Twitter collects a wealth of information about its users, such as their gender, the languages they speak, their music and television interests, the city they are based in, and even which mobile network provider they use. Now, the company has announced that it is making this data available to brands who wish to access it.

Last week, Gnip, a data platform owned by Twitter, officially opened its Audience API to any brand that wishes to use its analytics tool to analyse the demographics and other data pertaining to the people who have interacted with their Twitter accounts and their website.

Before users get freaked out and worry about privacy issues, Twitter does not dish out information about individual accounts. All data it uses is anonymised and aggregated based on patterns of around 500 accounts. This means that Twitter will give information such as ‘50% of this audience group is male, with 37% of them living in London’.

Twitter initially unveiled this tool back in October 2015 but it had been a limited source of information. An example of this is that brands would only be able to get audience data if the brand in question had the individual ID of someone’s Twitter account.

In addition to making it easier for brands to get hold of the information, it will now enable them to create audience segments of users who follow any public account. From here, they can further segment accounts based on users who engaged with that particular brand’s tweet by retweeting, liking or even clicking a certain tweet.

Twitter isn’t adding any new information to the data it already collects already through Gnip’s Audience API. The current demographics available are:

Gender – Twitter will let brands know what the percentage statistics of a particular audience group are based on users’ Twitter handles, profile names and accounts they follow, and will cross reference them with expert third party companies.

Language – The language used by audiences will be calculated by Twitter using the language settings of user profiles and the language they tweet in. Brands will then be given percentage statistics of the results.

Location – Twitter can provide information about a user’s location through GPS signals and IP addresses and can provide statistics based on country, state/province/county, or specific cities.

Device – Twitter collects information regarding the device used when users access the various versions of its platform. It can let brands know whether it’s a smartphone, desktop computer or other portable device.

Finding out more about the users that interact with a company’s website and social media accounts can help a company determine what marketing strategy to adopt and enable them to tailor goods and services to the audiences that show an interest in that company. Tools such as Gnip and Twitter Analytics are available to help companies with this research.

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Alan Littler

Operations Manager at Engage Web

A bastion of fitness and athleticism, yet also a chocoholic, our Operations Manager Alan is a man of contradictions known for his fiendish powers of organisation.

Twitter to provide brands with more info about their audience