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?

Like this:

Similar to our approach to interest targeting, we’re able to understand gender by taking public signals users offer on Twitter, such as user profile names or the accounts she or he follows. We have strong confidence in this approach. A panel of human testers has found our predictions are more than 90 percent accurate for our global audience. And where we can’t predict gender reliably, we don’t –– and those users won’t be targetable through this feature.

Time will tell if that bold 90 percent accuracy rate is, uh, accurate – and, based on what has been written above, it seems a little wooly to me – but, if so, this new feature, while somewhat overdue, will be welcomed by brand marketers.

(Source: Twitter Advertising Blog.)