Social networking giant Twitter has introduced a new feature that will allow advertisers to target users on its platform based on their language.
It is being seen as the latest step by Twitter to attract more advertisers.
Advertising is the biggest source of revenue for Twitter – accounting for 90% of sales in the first quarter of this year.
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.
Global reach?
Social networking platforms such as Twitter have seen their pace of growth slow recently.
In its latest financial report, Twitter, which has 255 million active users, said the number of monthly users on the platform rose 5.8% in the first three months of the year, from the pervious quarter.
The growth rate was less than what most analysts had been expecting.
At the same time, there have also been concerns over the ability of such firms to translate their user base into money. In Twitter’s case, it reported a net loss of $132m (£78m) for the latest quarter.
As a result, firms have been looking at ways to increase their revenues.
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”.
Source: BBC