Twitter Audience Explorer
Discovering what your audiences on Twitter care about to help expand them further
In progress | Role: Design lead
Audience explorer is an evolution of the Twitter Trends project that helps advertisers and their agencies find and build new audiences with inputs from a keyword, an interest, demographic and more. Nearly two years in development, the product now has limited availability among a small set of advertisers.
THE CUSTOMER
Sophisticated advertisers with extensive Twitter Ads targeting needs looking to grow an existing audience.
THE CHALLENGE
All businesses like to think they know who their customer is. As a company grows in size and sophistication, that question becomes both easier with the teams who identify who those customer are, but also more difficult as the number of products increases. Small businesses have trouble finding difficulty with the accuracy of their customer identification hypotheses, and big businesses have trouble keeping track of an always-moving target.
Every business however has their core personas but they all have different ways of identifying those personas. Coffee drinkers, people interested in finance news, Midwestern Moms, and Downtown Dads.
To further complicate things, the things that those core personas care about are always changing because consumers can be… well, fickle. For instance, the collective consciousness of female gamers in the UK today interested in political news might be focused on something entirely different tomorrow.
There’s no better place to see this ever-shifting attention change than on Twitter.
Process: sketches
Process: whiteboarding
Process: mid-process
THE SOLUTION
With Audience explorer, we sought to create a level playing field for any advertiser or their agency to enter the audiences they care about and discover new facets to those personalities. Starting with all conversation happening on Twitter, the product customer quickly narrows down the audiences they care about.
People in the U.S.
People in the U.S. aged 18-34.
People in the U.S. aged 18-34 interested in beauty and fashion.
We’ve just built a basic persona, and from there the customer using Audience explorer can instantly see the things that audience talks about, the movies and TV shows they’re interested in, and related interests.
SELECT PRODUCT VIEWS
(Authentic values redacted and or changed to protect company privacy)
RESULTS
From identification of a real problem for advertisers, lots of conceptual sketching, working with data science teams, initial versions of this tool are being shared with advertisers with very positive reception.