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Twitter and Gender Targeted Advertising

As we have been learning in class, advertising on the Internet has changed the way advertising is done.  For example, the terms entered into a search engine will return advertising results relevant to what the user may be looking for.  The same occurs with Facebook, in which the pages people like and the topics they post about affect what advertisements they receive on the site.  Now Twitter is taking this principle of targeted advertising and applying that to the prediction of gender.

Now why is gender so important to targeted advertising in Twitter?  Well, Twitter is unique as a social network as it does not ask the users for their gender.  This is because businesses and organizations do not identify themselves as male or female.  But yet, marketers and advertisers desire to know the gender of users to better target their advertisements.  Gender is important as women tend to buy certain products such as cosmetics as opposed to men who buy products like power tools.  So how does Twitter accomplish this without explicitly asking users for their gender?

Twitter is able to make predictions about a users’ gender through the username and the accounts that he or she follows.  This process has been proven to be 90% accurate and the remaining 10% do not receive targeted advertising based on gender.  Through this advertisers are more able to promote their products to people who are more likely to purchase them based off of their gender.  And Twitter does not just stop there.  It has also been implementing targeted advertising based off of interests and location.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57540772-93/twitter-predicts-users-gender-for-targeted-advertising/

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