Twitter opens up it’s audience API, giving brands more data [@SmartInsights Alert]

Gnip's API let you see the demographic breakdown and interests of your Twitter community

Importance: [rating=4] (For Any brand using Twitter)

Yesterday Twitter opened up the API of Gnip, a data platform which it owns. Why should you care? Because Gnip handles all of Twitter's audience data, and given that Twitter knows it's users gender, language, city, and favourite shows, products and music, this data is marketing gold dust.

Twitter opened up the API to let brands see demographic information about people that see their Tweets, and then also from people viewing their site when you have Twitter's tailored audience tag set up. Before you start thinking that this is a horrific breach of privacy, don't worry, brands won't be able see demographic details or interests for individual users. Marketers won't be able to see that Jo Bloggs, 22 from Peterborough likes swimming and patterned drapes. What they will get is anonymised demographic data for the whole segment. The segment itself has to include at least 500 people so that there is no way that you could work out who accounts for what trends in the data.

So if Jo Bloggs had been on your site or viewed your tweets, you'd see that a proportion of your audience was female, a proportion liked swimming and proportion liked patterned drapes. But would have no idea who was behind each of the trends.

Twitter's competing for your ad dollars

This is a big move from Twitter, which has been struggling to continue growing users and compete with Facebook as well as newer and rapidly growing platforms like Instagram and Snapchat. The fact is, it's hard for Twitter to compete with Facebook for ad dollars when Facebook puts so much more user data at the advertisers fingertips. This is Twitter's attempt to change this, and while it doesn't beat Facebook's offering, it does help to narrow the gap between the two. This competition to deliver better targeting between the two platforms can only be good news for marketers, who are always hungry for data on their audience to help them refine their messaging and target their ads.

What kind of insights will marketers be able to get from the newly opened up API data?

• Gender
• Language
• TV - Twitter works out who likes what TV shows based on who they follow, who they re-tweet and what they tweet.
• Location
• Device - What share use Andriod, iOS,  desktop PC etc.
• Carrier- Who provides their internet access; AT&T, Verizon etc.

Start having a think about how you could use this data to better understand your audience and better target your ads. Twitter have just given Digital markers a great new string to add to their bow.