Twitter to let advertisers target users by interest

Twitter Inc plans to start allowing advertisers to directly target users on the basis of the interests they reveal in their tweets, the social media company said yesterday.

In a sign that it is looking to play a bigger role beyond being a bulletin board, with 400 million micro-messages posted daily, Twitter has moved to a strategy of actively sifting through what each user is reading and tweeting in order to discern every individual's interests.

Founded in 2006, Twitter is hoping to catch up to other consumer internet companies with technology to serve better-targeted ads.

For years, Google has raked in huge profits by displaying ads based on what a user searches for in its search engine, while Facebook encourages users to proactively input their "likes."
 
Twitter, though has long faced the challenge of indirectly inferring these preferences, something that has not helped it attract marketers.

In a bid to draw advertisers, the company yesterday also cut the minimum price of "promoted tweets" from 50 cents each to just a penny.

According to CEO Dick Costolo his company's value lay in its ability to mine its information flow to build "an interest graph" showing its users' preference profiles -- which could be used by marketers to deliver targeted and relevant ads.