Twitter wants brands to understand their fans with Audience Insights

Today Twitter is launching a new tool called Audience Insights to let users get a glimpse into who their followers are.

Audience Insights provides an advertiser with access to information about their followers and people who have engaged with them on Twitter. The dashboard provides an aggregation of user data that includes demographics, interests, purchasing behavior, television viewing behavior, lifestyle, and mobile footprint.

In practice, the tool lets advertisers know who they’re pitching before they launch a campaign. For instance, if you’re running a campaign for body wash you can use Audience Insights to suss out your ideal customer on Twitter and then look at the other products they’ve recently purchased, as well as what their general interests are. You can then launch a targeted campaign highlighting certain segments of Twitter through Twitter Ads.

Audience Insights is Twitter’s latest feature aimed at proving it can provide highly targeted ads, a sought-after feature for most advertisers and a contentious one for privacy-conscious users.

For those consumers who shiver at the thought of their user data being handed over to advertisers, Twitter has a message:

Privacy was a top priority for us when developing audience insights. All information is aggregated, derived from Twitter data sources and information that is matched from our Marketing Platform Partners, such as Datalogix. This allows advertisers to see aggregate insights, while keeping user information private.

Audience Insights is available for Twitter-specific data starting today. The feature will expand more broadly in the coming months.