Do you use any of Twitter’s suite of promoted products?

If you do then we have some good news – you can now target and push ads towards individuals on Twitter based on their gender, which will help your message reach the most relevant audience.

But Twitter doesn’t ask for our gender when we sign up, and it isn’t always obvious whether a user is male or female (often intentionally so), so how have they solved the problem of mistargeting ads?

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Twitter has been pushing their ad platform on brands for some time, but the option to tap into this side of the micro-blogging network hasn’t been an option for your common or garden user… until now.

The company has started to roll out “Advertise On Twitter” pop-ups to select profiles when they visit Twitter.com, encouraging users to “grow your followers and help them spread the word about you”.

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Twitter’s advertising platform has been a controversial (and heavily scrutinized) source of revenue for the company, and it’s one that hasn’t yet delivered on the innovation we were promised by Twitter CEO Dick Costolo way back in 2009, leading to much egg on face.

Still, it’s a key part of the platform’s move towards profitability, and this nicely designed infographic from Mashable takes a look back at the history of advertising on Twitter, which begins with the very first tweet from founder Jack Dorsey.

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Twitter has refreshed its Twitter For Business pages to provide a lot more detail on how the platform can be beneficial for corporates.

The biggest changes are content-rich sections on their promotional features, which includes promoted tweets, trends, accounts and analytics.

Promoted Tweets

Promoted Trends

Promoted Accounts

Analytics

Twitter also expands on its Cost-per-Engagement (CPE) system:

When you promote a Tweet, only the most relevant users see it–put simply, that’s users that follow similar accounts to yours.

Promoted Tweets are offered on a Cost-per-Engagement (CPE) basis, so you only pay when a user Retweets, replies to, clicks on or favorites your Promoted Tweet. Retweeted impressions by engaged users are free, and can amplify the reach and cost-effectiveness of your campaign many times over.

I’m curious how you set a payment ceiling when an advertising message can be passed on by retweets – if you’ve hit your daily budget, does the message stop appearing completely, or are the retweets still ‘out there’ and, therefore, retweetable, at no extra cost to you?

While the advertising program is still in beta and only available to a select group of advertisers, Twitter has added a form to their business pages which allow everybody to sign up to be notified when the platform goes live to all. I’ve signed up, and if you’re a business or brand looking to leverage Twitter and its 175+ million users, so should you.