Twitter Unveils New Targeting Tool For Advertisers

Twitter is offering a new way for advertisers to deliver their marketing pitches to the people who are most likely to buy their products and services.

The targeting tool introduced Thursday allows ads to be sorted into different categories of interest. Once an ad has been tagged under a specific topic, such as "dogs" or "animation," it could crop up among the tweets of users whose activity has indicated an interest in those topics.

Twitter also is allowing the ads known as "promoted tweets" to be tied to specific accounts that may have followers likely to have an interest in the subject of a marketing message. The effort to sell more ads is part of Twitter's ongoing bid to capitalize on the popularity of its short-messaging service.

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