Twitter – about targeted advertising and blocking

Today I got a message to my mail from Twitter “Finnmatkat is now following your updates on Twitter”. When thinking through, at least for now, Twitter seems like a nice way to target ads through corporate profiles, and the greatness comes from the fact that people also have the power to block them if they want to.

Finnmatkat is a traveling agency in Finland. I myself don’t often use these kinds of agencies because I like to plan trips together with my girlfriend, because it’s much more fun that way than to buy a ready made package.

What I began to think with this announcement was that this kind of advertising in Twitter can be a good way to target ads if done properly. Doing it properly means beginning it with searching who are your true target groups [this can be done for example using Twitter search with right keywords – more useful Twitter tools here] and providing them with practical and interesting information and not just ads.

I began to follow Finnmatkat. I don’t usually use their services but here’s my motives: I like to travel and am interested about different cultures and feel that following their updates could provide me some kind of interesting offers and information that may benefit me in the future.

The greatness that lies in this kind of advertising is that, if I feel their updates are useless and not interesting at all, and the same offer to Fuengirola is all they got, I can hit the ‘Unfollow’ button or even block them.

This is something I cannot do with advertising if I want to while watching TV [unless i shut it down or save my programs without ads to my digital hard drive etc.], in the city streets [of course closing my eyes or looking my shoes while walking does the trick] or elsewhere in the web [of course there are applications like Ad block, but overall web advertising is just noisy].

But inside Twitter I can do it, at least currently. Time will tell if the future stays the same or will the ‘Twitterboard’ come greedy and try to force advertising to profiles somehow. Hopefully not, because I believe that’s the day when Twitter is starting to dry up. At least I’m going to quit using it.