Audience types: Conversation targeting

Audiences and conversations thrive on Twitter. To complement all that organic activity, Twitter Ads offers exclusive conversation targeting capabilities. With this, you can quickly target audiences based on the conversations they’re actively participating in on the platform. Choose from over 10,000 conversation topics across 25 categories, including sports, lifestyle, video games, books, and more.

How it works

Choose from our over 10,000 conversation topics to target an audience participating in that conversation. To see a full list of available conversation topics download this syntax sheet. 

To add conversation targeting to your campaign:

1. Go to the “Targeting” section of your campaign setup
2. Under the “Audience features” section, click “All” and select “Conversation topics”
3. Type in a search term for a topic you want to target in your campaign, such as a movie genre or a specific brand
4. From there, you can add the conversation topic to your campaign targeting by clicking “Add” 

Please note that conversation targeting topics cannot be bulk uploaded.

Get the details

When you hover over a conversation topic in your campaign setup, you’ll see a box with the following information:

1. Name of conversation topic audience
2. Description of users in the audience
3. Estimated audience size

People may be considered part of a conversation audience if they’ve Tweeted or engaged with a Tweet mentioning the topic, or dwelled on a Tweet about the conversation topic. 

You’ll be able to see your campaign serving results by to conversation topic in Ads Manager > Audience section.

Frequently asked questions

How do you determine who was involved in a conversation?

Conversation targeting is powered by a human-tuned, rule-based keyword algorithm. These rules are tuned for precision and scale by carefully examining keywords for phrase or word matching, denylist matching, boolean expressions, author authentication (i.e. Nick Foles plays football, but not all his Tweets are included in the football conversation), time of Tweet validation, language matching, and more.

We consider a user to be engaged in a conversation if they have Tweeted or engaged with a Tweet that mentions a conversation topic, or dwelled on a Tweet about that conversation topic. There is a lookback window of 28 days. 

How does conversation targeting layer onto other targeting types?

Conversation targeting is an example of additive targeting, also known as “OR” targeting. 

If you select 5 conversation topics and 35 follower @handles in your campaign, your campaign is eligible to serve to anyone who fits any part of that 40-piece targeting. For example, someone participating in Conversation 1 OR Conversation 2 OR Conversation 3 OR @handle 2 could be eligible to be served your ad. We call this additive targeting because the more pieces of targeting you add to your campaign, the larger the potential audience. 

Conversation targeting will also take into account any subtractive, or “AND” targeting, you’ve chosen in your campaign. Gender, geo location, age, and language targeting are all “AND” targeting types, meaning that they will ALL be respected. For example, let’s say you set the following targeting parameters in your campaign: Females in the United Kingdom who are 18+, with 3 conversation topics and 35 follower @handles. Only 18+ females in the UK who are participating in Conversation 1 OR Conversation 2 OR Conversation 3 OR @handle 20, etc, will be eligible to be served your ad. 

Additive targeting types – “OR” targeting: 

These targeting types will layer onto each other, making your potential campaign audience larger. For example, someone who fits Targeting piece 1 OR piece 2 OR piece 3, etc will be eligible to be served your ad. 

• Interest
• Username (follower look-alikes)
• Movies and TV shows
• Events
• Keywords
• Conversation topics

Subtractive targeting types – “AND” targeting:

These targeting types will make your potential campaign audience smaller, as they will all be respected. For example, someone who fits in targeting piece 1 AND piece 2 AND piece 3 will be eligible to be served your ad.

• Geo location
• Age
• Gender
• Device model
• Platform
• Language

What languages are included in conversation targeting?

All conversation topics work in English-speaking markets. We currently also provide limited support for Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and French. Please note that the coverage for topics may not be as comprehensive for languages outside of English.

If you’re looking at using conversation targeting for non-English languages, select the topic in the targeting drop-down under audience features and view the forecasted reach number. If it’s low or unavailable, add on additional targeting options to ensure your campaign has a large enough audience to serve.