Twitter is launching a new tool that lets advertisers target users on its platform based on their language, as the newly listed social network looks to boost its ad revenue.
The firm already lets advertisers target people by interest, keywords, gender, and geography.
“Advertisers can now target promoted tweets and promoted accounts in languages that their audience understands, while users are eligible to see highly relevant ads in their language,” Nipoon Malhotra, group product manager – revenue at Twitter, said in a blog post.
Advertising is the biggest source of revenue for Twitter – accounting for 90% of sales in the first quarter of this year.
A large chunk of Twitter’s users are outside the US and the firm said its new feature will help advertisers reach them.
“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.”
The firm said the new feature will be available in 20 different languages.
Twitter said it uses a numbers of different signals to determine a user’s language, including “the language selected in a user’s profile settings and the languages that correspond to a user’s activity on Twitter”.
Twitter reported a net loss of $132m (£78m) for the latest quarter. The social network has 255 million active users, with the number of monthly users rising 5.8% in the first three months of the year, from the previous quarter- lower than many analysts had expected.
https://blog.twitter.com/2014/introducing-language-targeting
